In 2004 Modern Art Oxford staged an installation of Mike Nelson’s ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’. On the upper floor of the gallery a steep hill of sand had been built. On top of this dune was a replica of an old wooden shack, based on Robert Smithson’s ‘Partially Buried Woodshed’ (1970). The whole was designed to create anxiety and uncertainty. Yet visitors to the exhibition lingered on the edge of the sand, reluctant to return to reality. The sand cast a spell. The visitors may have been reminded of pleasant days at the seaside in their childhood. This impression was reinforced by people who, entering the shack above, waved cheerfully to those of us down on the fringe of the dune, as though on holiday.

How we read environments depends on our own situation. For instance, those who live in filthy environments long for clean places, which may vary, given that a Western city may be muckier than a village in a dwindling Amazonian forest. Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (1516) talks of the selling of meat in a market-place where ‘the filth and ordure thereof is clean washed away in the running river […] lest the air by the stench thereof, infected and corrupt, should cause pestilent diseases’. By such imaginings we learn something of Utopia but perhaps more about the state of London in the time of Henry VIII. These days we would hesitate to pollute More’s running river. Similarly we would be unhappy to read the notice that once stood on a pier on the Isle of Wight saying: ‘Do not drop your rubbish on the pier. Throw it in the sea.’ Sensibilities change with technology.

more from Frieze here.

From Powell’s Books:

Since opening Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini: The Essential Reference approximately an hour ago, I’ve raved about it (and practically drooled on it) to seven people now. I haven’t actually tested any of the recipes yet — although I’m planning to as soon as possible — but their names alone: Salad of Crunchy Artichoke and Endive with Honeyed Lemon, Oven-Crisped Large Oyster Mushrooms, and Cranberry-Glazed Long Red Italian Radishes, to cite a few — are making me hungry.

Elizabeth Schneider really does seem to have created the ultimate reference guide for vegetables, and I should know — those books are amongst my favorite cookbooks, as a vegetarian. (Though the stars of these recipes are vegetables, many also include meat.) At 777 pages, with tons of gorgeous color photography, any vegetable you can think of — really, I dare you — has its own loving tribute, plus quite a few that I, at least, had never heard of — African horned cucumber, anyone? Chickweed? Tindora? Besides the photographs for easy visual identification, Schneider lays out the history and provenance of the vegetable, its basic use, selection, storage, and preparation information (which is detailed and thorough), and then lists several recipes, which manage to be both elegant and generally simple.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Imagine that your child’s private school tuition bill of $20,000 is due and the only source you have for paying it is the sale of some of your stock holdings. Fortunately, you got in on the great Google godsend and purchased 100 shares at $200 each, for a total investment of $20,000, and the stock is now at $400 a share. Should you realize your net gain by selling half of your Google stock and paying off your bill? Or should you sell off that Ford stock you purchased ages ago for $40,000 at its current value of $20,000?

If you are like most people (myself included), you would sell your Google stock and hang on to your Ford stock in hopes of recovering your losses. This would be the wrong strategy. Why would you sell shares in a company whose stock is on the rise, and hang on to shares in a company whose stock is on the decline? The reason, in a phrase, is “loss aversion,” and the psychology behind it does not fit the model of Homo economicus, that figurative species of human characterized by unbounded rationality in decision making.

More here.

More here.  And see cool video here.

[Thanks to Stefany Anne Golberg.]

From CBC News:

The European Space Agency is looking for people who would like to go on a pretend trip to Mars — for about a year and a half.

The 520-day experiment involves a crew of six living in sealed modules at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow.

Promising a program “as close to a real Mars mission as possible,” the space agency plans to simulate a 250-day trip to Mars, 30 days to experience the planet and 240 days to make it back home.

Weightlessness and radiation are not included, but the simulated out-of-planet experience offers isolation, confinement, crowding, lack of privacy, high workload, boredom with available food, and limited communication with family, friends and mission control.

Still keen? You might be just what the agency needs if you are:

• Between ages 25 and 50.
• In good health.
• Highly motivated.
• Fluent in either English or Russian, preferably both.
• No taller than six-foot-one (185 cm).
• Experienced in medicine, biology, engineering and the like.
• A non-smoker with no addictions.
• Willing to be a medical and psychological test subject.
• A national and resident of a select list of countries — including Canada.

People with mental disorders, special diets, those considered too fat or too thin, or currently in jail need not apply.

More here.  [Thanks to Pablo Policzer.]

Nicholas Schmidle in the Boston Review:

Last December, Shahidul sparked a nationwide furor and reinvigorated a long-standing debate in Bangladesh. Four weeks before the parliamentary elections scheduled for January 22 (but later postponed), his party signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Awami League, one of the nation’s two mainstream parties and traditionally its most secular one. The agreement stipulated that Shahidul’s Khelafat Majlish would team up with the Awami League for the elections. If they won, the Awami League promised to enact a blasphemy law, push legislation to brand the Ahmadiyyas as non-Muslims, and officially recognize the fatwas issued by local clerics. The deal outraged secularists across the country. “Khelafat Majlish is a radical Islamist militant group which is against the spirit of the Liberation War,” said the Anti-Fundamentalism and Anti-Militant Conscious Citizens’ Society in a written statement. “By ascending to power through a deal with a section of fundamentalist militants, the Awami League… will never be able to create a secular Bangladesh.”

The Western media had been predicting similar things for years. In January The New Republic suggested that, “Left unchecked, Bangladesh could become another Afghanistan—a base for regional terrorism.”

But the prospects for Bangladesh, a country roughly the size of Minnesota, with 170 million inhabitants, are not nearly as certain as such reports would suggest. Islamist parties have multiplied over the past decade and public support for them has grown. Yet Bangladeshi society remains overwhelmingly secular, even militantly secular. And while the Islamists have grabbed headlines, the secularists are holding their own in an intense power struggle.

More here.

To channel Brad DeLong: why, oh why have we been ruled by these creeps? Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker:

If there was a redeeming aspect to the [Abu Ghraib] affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Eskimo hunters killed a bowhead whale off the coast of Alaska last month and began to chainsaw their way into its blubber. They stopped when the saw hit the tip of an old harpoon lodged deep inside the whale. Historians identified it last week as part of a bomb lance, a harpoon manufactured for only a few years in the late 1800s in New Bedford, Mass. Whalers probably fired it at the bowhead around 1890, when the whale was probably a teenager, and it carried the harpoon for the next 115 years before finally being killed by a modern one.

Whales don’t carry birth certificates, so scientists usually can make only rough estimates of their age by examining protein in the lenses of their billiard-ball-size eyes. The bomb lance is pretty clear proof that this particular bowhead whale lived longer than any human on record. Had the whale escaped the second harpoon, scientists say it might have lived another 80 years. Indeed, the age of another bowhead examined by scientists in 1999 was put at 211 years. It holds the record for the longest-lived vertebrate.

More here.  And in his blog, The Loom, Carl Zimmer adds:

If you want to head for some scientific sources, check out the web site of Linda Partridge, a leading thinker on the evolution of aging at University College London. She’s got lots of pdf’s posted there, such as this 2006 review of the new field of “evo-gero”–evolutionary gerontology. And if you want to know just how long a tree frog can live (22 years!), check out the AnAge Database.

More here.

For the writers of the Old Testament, ants held a particularly important place as an exemplar for human behaviour: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise”, reads Proverbs 6: 6. Repeatedly, comparisons have been made between human society and the scurrying activity of insect societies. For the pioneer Dutch entomologist Jan Swammerdam (1637–80), viewing ants through his mystical Christian glasses, life in the ant nest was positively idyllic: “love and unanimity, more powerful than punishment or death itself, preside there and all live together in the same manner as the primitive Christians anciently did, who were connected by fraternal love, and had all things in common”. Modern myrmecologists would see things very differently, but their views are probably equally tinged by their surrounding culture. Contemporary scientists argue that behind the superficial cooperation and order of the ant nest lurk powerful conflicting interests between the queen and the workers, an ageist division of labour, and complex behaviours that emerge out of very simple rules. No love, no unanimity, but selfish genes and conflict.

more from the TLS here.

It is not easy to live together with our grave historical experiences. It is not easy to face the brutal fact that the trough of existence into which mankind sank during our century is not just an outlandish story, peculiar to one or two generations, but also, at one and the same time, an empirical norm that encompasses general human contingency, and thus, in this particular setting, our own contingency. One is appalled by the ease with which totalitarian dictatorships are able to liquidate the independent individual self, and with which a person becomes a snugly fitting, compliant cog in a dynamic state machine. One is seized by fear and uncertainty that so many people, even we ourselves, during certain segments of their lives, can be transformed into beings that the rational self, with its sound civic, moral instincts, will later on be unable – and not wish – to recognise or identify with. There was a time when man was God’s creation, a tragically fated creature who needed salvation. That lonely being was first leavened by ideological totalitarianism into a mass, then enclosed within the walls of a closed political system, and finally degraded into a lifeless cog in the works. At that point, there is no need for salvation, because he is not answerable for himself. Ideology has robbed him of his cosmos, his solitude, the tragic dimension of the human fate. It has squeezed him into a determinate existence where his fate is governed by his origins, his racial classification or his class loyalties. Along with his human fate, he is also robbed of human reality, the sheer sensation of living, so to say. In a totalitarian state we stand uncomprehending before the potential criminal acts, whereas all that we ought to be assessing is the extent to which the place of morality and the power of the human imagination have been subverted by the new categorical imperative: the totalitarian ideology.

more from Nobel Laureate Imre Kertesz here.

Steve Vogel’s interesting new book, The Pentagon: A History, tells the story of the design and construction of what is still the largest office building in the world—4 million square feet. One of the surprising facts to emerge from this thoroughly researched narrative is the degree to which the then-president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, involved himself in the project. For example, he played a major role in the selection of the site. The Army and the Department of War had opted for a prominent spot, at the foot of the Arlington Memorial Bridge and directly across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial. The Commission of Fine Arts, charged with overseeing design in the capital, objected on the grounds that the immense building would block the main axis of L’Enfant’s plan, and the matter landed on Roosevelt’s desk. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, who was in charge of the project, insisted on the original location. “My dear general,” FDR hotly responded, “I’m still commander-in-chief of the Army!” The building was moved to its present, less obtrusive site.

more from Slate here.

From Nature:

Lynn Kimsey was one of 137 witnesses called to testify in the murder trial of Vincent Brothers, who stood accused of killing his wife, mother-in-law and children in Bakersfield, California. Brothers said that he was in Ohio at the time of the murders; he had rented a car there, and driven it no further west than St Louis, Missouri. When Kimsey took the stand, she revealed the identity of four key informants that would unpick this alibi: a grasshopper, a paper wasp and two ‘true bugs’. All four told her that Brothers’ rental car had been well beyond St Louis.

Kimsey, who was branded “the bug lady” by media covering the trial, is an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. She had been enlisted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to identify the insect carcasses plastered on the rental car’s radiator and air filters, to see whether these could place where the vehicle had been driven. The four bugs she presented to the jury are, she said, only found west of Missouri. After hearing this and much more evidence, the jury found Brothers guilty on 29 May.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The committee that recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood did not discuss any possible political ramifications and never imagined that the award would provoke the furious response that it has done in parts of the Muslim world, the Guardian has learnt. It also emerged yesterday that the writers’ organisation that led the lobbying for the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses to be knighted had originally hoped that the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.

The news came as the row spread around the world and the British high commissioner in Islamabad made representations to the Pakistani government over remarks supposedly made by the minister for religious affairs, Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq, in which he appeared to justify suicide bombings as a response to the award. Rushdie was celebrating his 60th birthday in London yesterday and is not commenting on the latest threats to his life. It is understood he is anxious not to inflame the situation. Scotland Yard declined to comment as a matter of policy on whether the writer has been given police protection.

More here.

I’ve just started reading this wonderfully stimulating memoir recently and want to recommend it. The following review is by Ben Loehnen in TimeOut:

Halfway through Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s new memoir, A Mirror Garden, she describes playing a game of Twister in front of the shah: “I was sprawled akimbo on the plastic mat with my ass in the air.” This comical image—of a woman straddling East and West, the ancien régime and modernity—is a touchstone for Farmanfarmaian’s life. Born into Persia’s ruling class in 1924, she is a zany woman with a sense of adventure and curiosity reminiscent of Auntie Mame.

During World War II, the budding artist moved to New York City, where she studied painting and became something of a fixture in the fashion world. After a turbulent marriage (and the birth of one child), she returned to Iran in 1957, lured by an incipient romance with a prince, whom she eventually married. Her privileged life allowed her to scour Iran for the folk art and architectural detritus that informed so much of her own work until 1978, when the shah fell. Knowing that they would become pariahs in fundamentalist Iran, Farmanfarmaian and her husband returned to New York City to recast the shards of their lives.

More here.

Cullen Murphy in the Los Angeles Times:

You’ve seen the phrase a hundred times: “the world’s longest boundary between a First World and Third World country.” But hearing those words the other day, as the immigration bill seemed to be falling apart in the Senate, my thoughts turned not to the 2,000-mile border of the United States and Mexico but to ancient Rome’s 6,000-mile border with … well, its border with everywhere.

There’s a widespread view that the Roman Empire was swept away mainly by a relentless tide of hostile outsiders; we’ve all heard ugly references to the “barbarian hordes” in today’s immigration debates. But the truth is that Rome was the world’s most successful multiethnic state until our own — and history’s longest lasting one, bar none.

So it’s natural to wonder if the Romans might have anything to teach Americans. I’d argue that they do. One lesson is that the notion of “taking control of the borders” is overrated; borders were pliable then, and are even harder to define (or police) now. A second lesson is the importance of nurturing a national culture. It was the source of Rome’s power, just as it is the source of ours.

More here.

Virginia Heffernan in Screens (her New York Times blog):

According to Richard Rorty, natural disasters can kill thousands and millions of people, but leave Western institutions intact.

Terrorist attacks kill comparatively few people, but because they infantilize the citizenry and engender paranoia and a spirit of vengeance that licenses despotism, they can destroy institutions, including even the rule of law.

This is Richard Rorty’s speech on the assigned subject of Anti-Terrorism and the National Security State at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, on March 4, 2004. He looks miserable delivering it. He had intended in the 1990s to shift his focus to poetry, I believe; sadly, politics kept mugging him.

Part 2 of the video here.  Also see this brilliant bit: What Died When Rorty Died?

Evan Schnittman in the Oxford University Press blog:

To avoid confusion lets get everyone on the same page. Google Library (GL, as opposed to Google Book Search) is a program that has scanning facilities set up at 17+ libraries around the globe. These facilities digitize the print books in a given collection and then index the text so that it can be discovered by Google’s search engine. The search engine displays only a snippet (250 characters or so) of the book when there is a search hit, if the book is in copyright. In exchange for sharing their collections, Google gives a digital file of each book to the library for their archives. GL should not be confused with Google Book Search (GBS), which is a publisher sanctioned program in which Google licenses the right, from publishers, to digitize, index, and display 20% of a book for the purpose of making it “discoverable” in Google’s search engine. See The ABC’s of GBS, Part 1 for a complete description.

Over the last couple of weeks there has been some buzz in the tech and publishing blogosphere over a stunt pulled by Macmillan’s UK-based CEO Richard Charkin at BEA (Book Expo America). In an effort to illustrate his view on GL, Charkin went into the Google stand with an accomplice, took two laptops, and waited nearby to see what would happen (see Charkblog). After some time, a Google rep asked what was going on – Charkin pointed out that he was doing exactly what Google was doing to publishers. As “there was no sign that said ’do not steal the laptops,’” and, therefore, he felt the right to walk off with one. While I found this extremely amusing as a prank – (Charkin Punk’d Google!) I think the effort missed on a major point.

Google interpreted copyright law in a search engine friendly manner and decided that the act of digitizing books found in libraries, indexing that content, and then displaying only the smallest “snippet” of that content (250 characters), was no different than what they do spidering the internet and displaying snippet results. This is where the world of the internet and book publishing collide culturally – Charkin sees this as theft, Google sees it as how they operate on the internet – indexing content in order to make it discoverable without having to ask permission…

More here.  [Thanks to Rebecca Ford.]

A poem by Fujiwara no Kiyosuki, via JC:

I May Live On

I may live on until
I long for this time
In which I am so unhappy,
and remember it fondly.