Norman Levitt in Skeptic:

The very first thing I did in drafting this review was to Google Chester Alan Arthur. I trust my readers will recall the name, if only after a bit of head-scratching, as that of one of the most obscure and unmemorable of American presidents, a run-of-the-mill New York politician who attained to the highest office in the land by virtue of the assassination of his almost equally obscure predecessor, James A. Garfield, who picked the party wheel-horse Arthur as his running mate for reasons now totally forgotten.

What has this to do with John A. Paulos’s recent book Irreligion? It is well known, of course, that some our most eminent presidents—Jefferson, Lincoln, Madison—spurned orthodoxy in religious matters, even to the point of—to use Paulos’s convenient title—irreligion. This, of course, is sufficiently embarrassing to our fundamentalist ayatollahs that they have been furiously rewriting history, chiseling away at the facts with all the fury of the restored priests of Amun hacking off Nefertiti’s heretical nose. What interested me more, however, was the question of whether disdain for religion was purely the province of politicians who where gifted intellectuals as well, or whether it was at one point so widespread and socially acceptable that even routine mediocrities, hacks, and tub-thumpers could espouse such views without being banished from public life and high office.

More here.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy in Dawn:

It’s May 1998 and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif congratulates wildly cheering citizens as the Chagai mountain trembles and goes white from multiple nuclear explosions. He declares that Pakistan is now safe and sound forever.

Bomb makers become national heroes. Schoolchildren are handed free badges with mushroom clouds. Bomb and missile replicas are planted in cities up and down the land. Welcome to nuclear Pakistan.

Fast-forward the video 10 years. Pakistan turns into a different country, deeply insecure and afraid for its future. Grim-faced citizens see machine-gun bunkers, soldiers crouched behind sandbags, barbed wire and barricaded streets. In Balochistan and Fata, helicopter gunships and fighter jets swarm the skies.

Today, we are at war on multiple fronts. But the bomb provides no defence. Rather, it has helped bring us to this grievously troubled situation and offers no way out. On this awful anniversary, it is important that we relate the present to the past.

More here.  [Scroll down.]

This is cool:

See more videos at his website. More from Jennifer over at Cocktail Party Physics:

A couple of weeks ago — May 14, to be exact — a Swiss man named Yves Rossy (a.k.a., “Fusion Man“) made headlines (and secured a little piece of history) when he strapped on an 8-foot jet-powered wing and leaped from an airplane, soaring over the Alps. Rossy spent years developing his device, and successfully flew the first jet-powered wing in November 2006. There’s been a smattering of R&D on jet packs to propel human beings dating as far back as World War II; Rossy’s invention is the first to combine a jet pack with actual wings.

It’s been a big month for would-be aviators. In April, another Swiss man — what is it with the Swiss these days? — jumped from a hovering helicopter and floated to earth using a pyramid-shaped parachute he built himself, based on a design by Leonardo da Vinci. Olivier Vietti-Teppa found the specifications in a da Vinci text dating back to 1485: four equilateral triangles, seven meters on each side, that Vietti-Teppi made from modern parachute fabric, using a square of mosquito netting at the base of the pyramid. Furthermore, later this year, Red Bull will hold three “flugtag” competitions in the US — Tampa Bay, FL, in July, Portland, OR, in August, and Chicago in September — whereby aspiring aviators build their own flying machines and then push them off a 30-foot platform (deliberately built over water) to see how far — or if — they can fly. Most drop like a stone into the water, but generally, a good time is had by all. And some of the whimsical designs can be a lot of fun; there have been machines shaped like Homer Simpson, a pimped-out Cadillac, a giant Oompah-Loompah, and even a big red lobster named Larry. (For those not inclined to build their own machines, there’s now an online game.)

Almost as long as mankind has been sentient, I’d wager we’ve been trying to find some means to fly, with more than a few casualties along the way.

I’ve never understood why if you respect, love, or admire X, you have to respect, love, or admire the conditions of its origin, or more narrowly, what inspired its creation.  My appreciation of Kipling does not commit me to an appreciation of British colonialism, for example. Tracy Quan makes this strange argument with respect to religion over at Comment is Free:

If you champion the splendors and benefits of Western culture, while claiming to oppose religion entirely, you are, metaphorically speaking, tone deaf.

Whether your preference is Bach, Britten, Palestrina, Kanye West or Earth, Wind and Fire, you’ll find some aspect of Christianity in the details.  But reggae – such as The Melodians doing Rivers of Babylon, based on a psalm of the exiled Jews – can’t easily be separated from religion, either. Run from religion, if you must, but you can’t hide from song, sculpture, poetry, architecture, painting, tourism or food.

Given that the influence of religion over the centuries has made them what they are, I can’t help seeing something crude in the impulse for some to bash it. As a “cafeteria” atheist and secular Catholic, I don’t share that impulse. Religion has given us some rather fabulous architecture, a lot of excellent paintings, a variety of head coverings – from yarmulkes through wimples, veils and turbans – which I , for one, find fascinating.

Via Neurophilosophy:

Spencer Ackerman in the American Prospect:

[T]he lessons of Vietnam sunk in on the comics juggernaut. Perhaps the idea that all the United States had to do was build bigger gadgets of disaster to use on a complicated world was hopelessly flawed. Perhaps Iron Man was symptomatic of the rot. Perhaps, by holding up a mirror to U.S. policies, Iron Man could become a vehicle for cleansing the country of its Cold War hang-ups. Marvel set to work reworking the character and its themes.

A problem confronted the company, though. Iron Man is a superhero. Cold-War product or not, Marvel couldn’t very well turn him into a villain. Writers in the 1970s and 1980s solved the problem in two creative ways. First, the comic adopted the New Left’s structural critique of Vietnam — the war was the inevitable product of a systemic belief in unrestricted capitalism, American exceptionalism, and racism — by making Stark Industries an enemy of poor Tony Stark, who had unleashed malevolent forces he couldn’t control. Thus Iron Man’s nemesis became a black-mirror version of himself: the ruthless metal juggernaut (another metal-suit weapon) subtly named Iron Monger, controlled by rival defense-industry bloodsucker Obadiah Stane. More cleverly, Stark’s best friend Jim Rhodes became a second Iron Man — but one sent into a paranoid frenzy of destruction by the armor’s inability to interface properly with his brain. Rhodes’s secret identity? War Machine.

The second way Marvel subtly readjusted Iron Man for America’s post-Vietnam sensibilities was to reveal that the reason Stark could control neither his company nor his relationships was that he couldn’t control himself.

From the CUP website:

Take advantage of great savings during our  White Sale. Save up to 80% on more than 1,000 titles.

*Please note: Some older cloth editions of books do not have book jackets.

Sale ends May 31st.

Go here.

From Nature:

The doughnut is making a comeback – at least as a possible shape for our Universe.

The idea that the universe is finite and relatively small, rather than infinitely large, first became popular in 2003, when cosmologists noticed unexpected patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the relic radiation left behind by the Big Bang. The CMB is made up of hot and cold spots that represent ripples in the density of the infant Universe, like waves in the sea. An infinite Universe should contain waves of all sizes, but cosmologists were surprised to find that longer wavelengths were missing from measurements of the CMB made by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

One explanation for the missing waves was that the universe is finite. “You can think of the Universe as a musical instrument – it cannot sustain vibrations that have a wavelength that is bigger than the length of the instrument itself,” explains Frank Steiner, a physicist at Ulm University in Germany. Cosmologists have suggested various ‘wrap-around’ shapes for the Universe: it might be shaped like a football or even a weird ‘doughnut’. In each case, the Universe would appear to be infinite, because you would never physically reach its edge – if you travelled far enough in any direction you would end up back where you started, just as if you were circumnavigating the globe.

More here.

Sarah Towers in the New York Times Book Review:

In this age of memoir and thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, writers who take high dives into deeply imagined waters have become increasingly rare — and valuable. What a pleasure, then, to discover that Jennifer Cody Epstein, whose luminous first novel, “The Painter From Shanghai,” is based on the actual life of Pan Yuliang, a former child prostitute turned celebrated painter, also happens to be one such writer.

It doesn’t hurt that Yuliang’s life — buffeted by the seismic cultural and political shifts in China during the first half of the 20th century — makes for an irresistible story: born in 1895 and orphaned as a child, Yuliang was sold into sexual slavery at 14 by her opium-addicted uncle. After seven years in the brothel, she was bought out by Pan Zanhua, a progressive official who made her his concubine, then his second wife, and encouraged her painting. One of a handful of women accepted into the Shanghai Art School, she went on to win fellowships for study in Paris and Rome. After several years abroad, she returned to China, where success and scandal — thanks to her Western-influenced nude self-portraits — followed. In 1937, with Shanghai and Nanking under bloody assault by the Japanese, Yuliang fled China for good, settling alone in Paris, where she died, impoverished, in 1977.

More here. You can read an interview with Jennifer Cody Epstein here. Her official website, with a lot more information, is here. And you can look at some paintings by Yuliang here. We are happy that Jennifer will right a guest column at 3QD soon.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

It’s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered his famous “Two Cultures” lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” the “hostility and dislike” that divided the world’s “natural scientists,” its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its “literary intellectuals,” a group that, by Snow’s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn’t a scientist. His critique set off a frenzy of hand-wringing that continues to this day, particularly in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.

Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.

Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr. Wilson’s evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published “Evolution for Everybody.” In Dr. Wilson’s view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?

More here.

Toni O’Loughlin in The Guardian:

Norman Finkelstein, the controversial Jewish American academic and fierce critic of Israel, has been deported from the country and banned from the Jewish state for 10 years, it emerged yesterday.

Finkelstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor who has accused Israel of using the genocidal Nazi campaign against Jews to justify its actions against the Palestinians, was detained by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, when he landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday.

Shin Bet interrogated him for around 24 hours about his contact with the Lebanese Islamic militia, Hizbullah, when he travelled to Lebanon earlier this year and expressed solidarity with the group which waged war against Israel in 2006. He was also accused of having contact with al-Qaida. But Finkelstein rejected the accusations, saying he had travelled to Israel to visit an old friend.

“I did my best to provide absolutely candid and comprehensive answers to all the questions put to me,” he told an Israeli newspaper in an email exchange.

More here.

glumbert – Women in Film

Tim Hames in The Telegraph:

A brilliant series of 13 short essays published by the John Templeton Foundation (at www.templeton.org/belief) offers different responses to the question: “Does science make belief in God obsolete?” The appeal of this slender volume is threefold.

The first part of its charm is the unexpected nature of many of the answers. Although about half of the contributors are in the “Yesish” camp, only one (Professor Victor Stenger) is willing to state unambiguously that: “Science has not only made belief in God obsolete. It has made it incoherent.”

Some of those whose opinions might have been considered predictable turn out not to be. Professor Robert Sapolsky is an outright “No”, because: “Despite the fact that I am an atheist, I recognise that belief offers something that science does not.”

Yet Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, answers both “No, and Yes”, because although he contends that the knowledge acquired by science makes belief in God “more reasonable than ever”, a reductive “scientific mentality” has, he says, “helped push the concept of God into the hazy twilight of agnosticism”. This is a brave concession from him.

The second element of the book’s appeal is the data that comes with some of the responses. Thanks to Christopher Hitchens (his answer was “No, but it should”)…

More here.  Original debate here.  [Thanks to Bilal Siddiqi.]

Along with The Atlantic Monthly and New York magazines and twelve others, we have won an award from the editors of The Morning News:

Favorite Blog to Embrace All That’s Smart

You try combining gossip stories with contemporary poetry with thought pieces on Chris Farley. Three Quarks Daily apparently took the same classes as us in college, subscribes to the same obscure science magazines, obsesses about Top Chef at similar pitch. Hell, if Stephen Pinker and David Byrne—and TMN—all love it, why say no?

More here.

Joe Wheelwright. Singing Stone. 2006.

Granite.

More on this Boston based sculptor here, here, and here.

Nick Bostrom in the Boston Globe:

Discovering traces of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance: The first time that any signs of extraterrestrial life had ever been detected. Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we’re not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos.

They shouldn’t. If they were wise, they’d hope that our probes discover nothing. It would be great news to find that Mars is a completely sterile planet.

On the other hand, if we discovered traces of some simple extinct life form – a bacterium, some algae – it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something even more advanced, like a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be horrible news. The more complex the life we found, the more depressing. Scientifically interesting, yes, but dire news for the future of the human race.

Why? To understand the real meaning of such a discovery is to realize just what it means that the universe has been so silent for so long – why we have been listening for other civilizations for decades and yet have heard nothing.

Over at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Brooks D. Simpson takes on some of the new revisionist accounts of the Civil War:

IR: A popular neo-Confederate theme is that many thousands of blacks voluntarily fought for the Confederacy. What do you make of that?

Simpson: From a light-hearted point of view, if there were all these black Confederate soldiers, given that we don’t see them show up [in historical records] as prisoners or killed or wounded, they must have been the best troops the Confederacy ever had, because they were never killed, wounded or captured. So an entire army of black Confederates would have been invincible.

If black Confederates were already there, one is at a loss to understand why white Southerners debated so ferociously over the introduction of blacks in the Confederate army late in the war. Certainly, there were blacks who accompanied the Confederate armies — servants of officers, wagon drivers, cooks, teamsters and the like. But they weren’t there, by and large, of their own volition.

They were there because they were enslaved. In terms of blacks actually in the ranks of the Confederate army, we’re talking about a handful of people at most.

You see a very selective use of the historical record by certain academics who are pushing an agenda. So where there has been some evidence of an African-American taking a weapon up in a Civil War battle and firing away in self-defense, that is transformed into regiment after regiment of African-Americans ready to fight.

Jessica Wapner in Scientific American:

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Flaherty, who studies conditions such as hypergraphia (an uncontrollable urge to write) and writer’s block, also looks to disease models to explain the drive behind this mode of communication. For example, people with mania often talk too much. “We believe something in the brain’s limbic system is boosting their desire to communicate,” Flaherty explains. Located mainly in the midbrain, the limbic system controls our drives, whether they are related to food, sex, appetite, or problem solving. “You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively,” Flaherty notes. Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.

In the Guardian, an excerpt from Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book, Unaccustomed Earth:

Occasionally a postcard would arrive in Seattle, where Ruma and Adam and their son Akash lived. The postcards showed the facades of churches, stone fountains, crowded piazzas, terracotta rooftops mellowed by late afternoon sun. Nearly fifteen years had passed since Ruma’s only European adventure, a month-long EuroRail holiday she’d taken with two girlfriends after college, with money saved up from her salary as a paralegal. She’d slept in shabby pensions, practicing a frugality that was foreign to her at this stage of her life, buying nothing but variations of the same postcards her father sent now. Her father wrote succinct, impersonal accounts of the things he had seen and done: “Yesterday the Uffizi Gallery. Today a walk to the other side of the Arno. A trip to Siena scheduled tomorrow.” Occasionally there was a sentence about the weather. But there was never a sense of her father’s presence in those places. Ruma was reminded of the telegrams her parents used to send to their relatives long ago, after visiting Calcutta and safely arriving back in Pennsylvania.The postcards were the first pieces of mail Ruma had received from her father. In her thirty-eight years he’d never had any reason to write to her. It was a one-sided correspondence; his trips were brief enough so that there was no time for Ruma to write back, and besides, he was not in a position to receive mail on his end. Her father’s penmanship was small, precise, slightly feminine; her mother’s had been a jumble of capital and lowercase, as though she’d learned to make only one version of each letter. The cards were addressed to Ruma; her father never included Adam’s name, or mentioned Akash. It was only in his closing that he acknowledged any personal connection between them.

From Geotimes:

“As I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come … I’d like to just [say] what I believe history will record — that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

On Dec. 17, 1972, Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17, said these words as he took a last look around at the stark moonscape of the Taurus-Littrow Valley on the southeastern rim of the moon’s Mare Serenitatis crater. Then, he and Harrison Schmitt, the lunar module’s pilot and the only geologist-astronaut to walk on the moon, stepped back into the lunar module one last time to return to Earth. Due to NASA’s shrinking budget and to make room for the space shuttle program, Apollo 17 was the last of NASA’s pioneering manned missions to the moon. But even then, no one imagined that it would be more than three decades before humans returned.

Later this year, however, NASA plans to launch its first new missions to the moon in more than 35 years. The goal: To scope out likely spots to land and create a habitat where astronauts can stay for longer than the Apollo program ever dreamed.

More here.