Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

A Supreme Court ruling with far-reaching consequences for American innovation turns on the definition of a single word.

Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe:

Last week, ruling in a dispute over the design of a gas pedal, the Supreme Court jolted the American patent system. The case, KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., dealt with the placement of an electronic sensor in an accelerator that could be adjusted according to a driver’s height — not in itself a matter of national concern. But the court used its decision to issue a broad rebuke of the way in which American patent cases are decided. In the process, some patent lawyers say, it may also have added a new level of uncertainty to an area of the law that is vital to the nation’s economy and our ability to protect and encourage innovation.

In a unanimous opinion, the justices ruled that the patent in question was invalid because designing a gas pedal in such a way was an “obvious” thing to do, at least to the average gas pedal designer, and therefore not really an invention. What’s more, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, argued that the current patent regime threatened to stifle the sort of creativity that the Founding Fathers had originally created the system to foster. Courts, Kennedy wrote, have been upholding patents for technologies or designs that didn’t need them, that would have been developed “in the ordinary course” of events. In doing so, they have allowed bogus inventions to steal business from legitimate ones, and discouraged true innovation.

More here.

Stephen S. Hall in the New York Times Magazine:

As an ancient concept and esteemed human value, wisdom has historically been studied in the realms of philosophy and religion. The idea has been around at least since the Sumerians first etched bits of practical advice — “We are doomed to die; let us spend” — on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago. But as a trait that might be captured by quantitative measures, it has been more like the woolly mammoth of ideas — big, shaggy and elusive. It is only in the last three decades that wisdom has received even glancing attention from social scientists. Erikson’s observations left the door open for the formal study of wisdom, and a few brave psychologists rushed in where others feared to tread.

In some respects, they have not moved far beyond the very first question about wisdom: What is it? And it won’t give anything away to reveal that 30 years after embarking on the empirical study of wisdom, psychologists still don’t agree on an answer. But it is also true that the journey in many ways may be as enlightening as the destination.

More here, including a questionnaire to test your own wisdom.

In the TimesOnline (via Sci Tech Daily):

As rejection letters go, it would have taken some beating. The publishers of Charles Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species, considered turning down his manuscript and asking him to write about pigeons instead.

The near-miss was unearthed in 150-year-old correspondence between Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, and a clergyman, the Rev Whitwell Elwin. Elwin was one of Murray’s special advisers, part of a literary panel that was the Victorian equivalent of a modern focus group.

He was asked by the London publisher for his opinion of Darwin’s new work, which challenged Old Testament ideas of Creation. Unsurprisingly for a man of the cloth, Elwin disapproved. Writing back from his rectory in Norwich on May 3, 1859, he urged Murray not to publish. Darwin’s theories were so farfetched, prejudiced and badly argued that right-thinking members of the public would never believe them, he said. “At every page I was tantalised by the absence of the proofs,” Elwin wrote, adding that the “harder and drier” writing style was also off-putting.

He suggested that Darwin’s earlier observations on pigeons should be made into a book as “everybody is interested in pigeons”. He enthused: “The book would be received in every journal in the kingdom and would soon be on every table.”

Fortunately, Murray chose to ignore the advice. He went on to publish On the Origin of Species. The rest, as they say, is history.

Ice Sculpture No. 1

A huge ice dolphin carrying a suitcase of ransom money in his snout jumps an aircraft carrier (made of ice). A formation of ice jet planes have to pull “evasive maneuvers” to avoid smashing into the dolphin’s huge icy dorsal fin. An ice rainbow frames the scene.

Ice Sculpture No. 2

A full-scale ice sports car peels out of a full-scale ice Mrs. Winners, and some ice skanks get turned on.

Ice Sculpture No. 3

A Rollerblader made of ice grinds his way down a huge spiral staircase. At the bottom of the staircase, there is a trapdoor, leading to a gay bar.

more Ice Sculptures at McSweeney’s here.

The room has no choice. Everything that’s spoken in it it absorbs. And it must put up with

the bad flirt, the overly perfumed,
the many murderers of mood—
with whoever chooses to walk in.

If there’s a crowd, one person
is certain to be concealing a sadness,
another will have abandoned a dream,

more from Stephen Dunn’s poem at The New Yorker here.

United States of America Boulevard: there was a time when no self-respecting black-township resident would have wanted an address so redolent of US imperialism. Just a decade or so ago, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were township street names of choice. One might have thought that Hugo Chávez would now be keeping South African sign-makers busy. No chance, or at least not in Cosmo City, a flashy new housing estate on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Here the US of A Boulevard is among the most sought-after addresses – as is Las Vegas Crescent – because it is here that members of the new, black middle class are flocking in droves, in search of mock-Tuscan villas and a share of the consumerist new South African dream.

When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, his first speech brimmed with vintage redistribution rhetoric. To be fair on the “old man”, it had been forced upon him by anti-apartheid radicals, who feared he had gone soft behind bars, but not surprisingly the markets dived. Since then, however – indeed, since the very next morning – the economic policies of the African National Congress have moved to the right. Now, as South Africa celebrates the anniversary of Mandela’s inauguration on 10 May, bigwigs in the ruling party are embracing capitalism with such relish that President Thabo Mbeki, the very man who unleashed this capitalist fervour, is expressing unease over some of his old comrades’ pursuit of bling, and the long-quiescent unions are muttering that it is time to take “back” the party.

more from The New Statesman here.

From The Washington Post:

THE AMERICANIST By Daniel Aaron.

Many memoirs try hard to re-create past moments, the arguments around the family dinner table, the horrors of poverty, the elation of first love. But Aaron, now in his 90s, eschews all this scene-setting and melodrama. Instead, he pointedly tells us just what he thought of the many presidents under whom he has lived (starting with Woodrow Wilson) and modestly reflects on some of his students, friends, teachers and colleagues. As a graduate assistant at Harvard, he graded the English assignments of “an intense hungry-looking fellow” named Norman Mailer as well as the “so-so examination paper” of John Kennedy. One of his good pals back then was the poet Charles Olson. He neatly ends a pen portrait of his mentor Perry Miller, the intellectual historian of colonial America, with this wry summary of the scholar’s later life (and that of many another aging college professor):

“World War II both energized and undid Miller. He entered it in some noncombatant role and returned from it a romantic swashbuckler boasting about the Germans he had slain. After the war, Miller became an alcoholic, was ejected by his wife, and courted pretty graduate students.”

More here.

From Nature:

“What’s your Abel number?” was the big question being asked by pharmacologists this week at the Experimental Biology meeting in Washington, DC. Members of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) were swept up in a game, akin to playing six degrees of separation, in which researchers compete to be the most closely related to the man regarded as the field’s founder: John J. Abel.

Abel pioneered the discipline of pharmacology in the late nineteenth century, forming departments at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University, and founding ASPET. Most famous for his work isolating adrenaline, an important stress hormone, Abel published almost 100 papers during his career. These papers are shared with a total of 27 co-authors, who, in the new game, are assigned an ‘Abel number’ of 1. Those 27 scientists co-published with at least 278 individuals (who get an Abel number of 2), who in turn published with at least 3,000 more (Abel number 3s).

Bylund borrowed the idea from mathematicians, who define themselves with an Erdos number to see how close they are to the late and extremely prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos.

More here.

In the Economist:

SEX, in most species of bird, is a consensual activity. It has to be. Males have no penises and are armed with a genital opening which looks little different from that of a female. Intercourse happens when these two openings are brought together in what ornithologists refer to as a cloacal kiss. In these circumstances, rape is a difficult option.

Drakes, however, are notorious rapists—forcing their attentions on ducks indiscriminately—and it is surely no coincidence that they are among the 3% of male birds that do have a penis. In fact, drake penises come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes that are thought by students of the subject to be part of an arms race to ensure that it is the owner’s sperm that fertilise the next generation of ducklings, rather than anybody else’s.

The question is, an arms race against whom? The males of many species of insect have similarly elaborate genitalia. These seem designed to compete directly against other males—for example by scraping out the sperm of previous suitors or breaking off and blocking the female’s genital opening. But Patricia Brennan, of Yale University, and her colleagues suspected that in ducks and drakes the arms race might be between the sexes rather than between members of the same sex. Females, in other words, would rather choose which males inseminate them. And if rape is inevitable, evolution might provide them with other ways of making this choice.

I think my on-again, off-again interest in Hitchens results from this: in Hitchens we find a distilled logic of the confused, often self-indulgent, and vain politics that emerged with the collapse of the New Left. (Yes, there are some good things to say about it.) If we find in the politics of people like Leszek Kołakowski and Milovan Djilas symbols of the tragedy of the Old Left, and farce in figures like Eldridge Cleaver, then in Hitchens I personally find the surrealism of the politics that started sometime in the 1970s. From an interview in Radar on the occassion of his naturalization:

You’ve lived in this country since 1981. Why did you recently decide to become an American citizen? Why did I do it?

It was a post-September 11th feeling. I realized that I’ve been living here a long time and that this country, this society, had been pretty welcoming to me. I was just cruising along with a green card and felt like I was cheating on my dues.

And if you want to argue for war, you do it in two ways: One is to argue there is a war, which I think everyone believes, and the other is that we should be fighting in it, which means advocating in public that people go to Iraq or Afghanistan. I felt I probably ought to be a citizen for that.

Now that you’re able to vote in the next presidential election, are you going to register for a particular political party?

No. I don’t have any party allegiances. Before I could vote, I wrote in a column that I was for the re-election of George Bush, Sr. That was the first time I ever wrote or said in public who I was for. If George Bush, Sr., had that second term, I think we would be living in a better world in lots of ways. One of which would have been, we never would have elected George Bush, Jr. People forget that. People who always vote Democratic don’t realize that if they didn’t want this George Bush they should have voted for the last. They think of it as zero-sum: You’re either an elephant or a donkey. I hate the whole mentality. It produces boring parties and bad politicians. I’ve never been a supporter of either party in America. My line is that I dislike the Republicans, but I despise the Democrats.

There is no doubt that some works that exalt authority over freedom, hatred over tolerance and the strong over the weak can be good or even great art – the writings of Nietzsche, for example, of Hamsun and Céline. But that is not because of their formal achievement alone. It is because they also examine the ideals they express; because they include at least some self-criticism and reflection. The problem with Leni Riefenstahl’s films – and with her photographs too, most famously of the Nuba people of Sudan – is that they contain no such reflection. They exalt beauty and strength, and a simplified notion of nobility, and that is all. They are, therefore, not art, but propaganda – superb propaganda, technically innovative propaganda, but propaganda all the same. They misrepresent the reality of Nazi power, and Nuba life, showing only a glittering, manipulated surface, not the complex and (in the case of the Nazis) horrifyingly costly truth. Art is about more than beauty, as Susan Sontag said. Leni Riefenstahl ‘had a flair for the stunning image and the histrionic episode’, Bach writes, but none for any human feeling or truth. He quotes Thomas Mann: ‘art is moral in that it awakens’, while ‘Leni’s art lulled and deceived’. Leni Riefenstahl was not an artist, but a gifted propagandist for an evil cause. That is Bach’s conclusion. His will probably be the definitive biography. I certainly hope so.

more from Literary Review here.

When did teenage angst and arrogance begin? Many baby boomers, still fighting over the legacy of the 1960s as they lurch toward retirement, think of themselves as products of the rock ’n’ roll rebellion that shattered the bourgeois proprieties of the 1950s. Chronicled in song and witnessed by the new electronic media, the impudent saga of the ’60s counterculture seemed unique.

Jon Savage’s massive new book, “Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture,” provides the prequel. There has in fact been wave after wave of youthful defiance — Savage begins his study in the 19th century — whether idealistic or hedonistic or both. The author of “England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond,” Savage seems more at home with popular culture than with the fine arts. Hence the material in “Teenage” on ragtime, swing and the movies is stronger than that on modernist painters and poets.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From The New York Times:

THE JOY OF DRINKING by Barbara Holland:

Holland slowly savors what E. B. White called, in that genteel New Yorker way, “the golden companionship of the tavern.” She notes that “in a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or,” God help us all, “the Red Sox.” And she knows that “to extract the fullest flavor of our drinking house, we needed to spend serious evening time there, slowly coming to know the bartender and the regulars, their joys and sorrows.” But becoming a “regular” isn’t as easy as “Cheers” may have made it seem; a decent bar’s culture is tough to crack.

Coffeehouses, it must be admitted, have often vied with bars for our affections. In Shakespeare’s day, Holland writes, “coffeehouses sprang up to challenge the taverns. The authorities were suspicious of the whole thing and sent spies to eavesdrop. In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.

More here.

From Edge:

When it comes to creatures living in the oceans, I, like most people, have always been enthralled by the popular favorites such as whales, polar bears and sea otters. It takes a special person to appreciate that there is just as much wonder to be found in the ocean’s smallest and humblest organic forms—the microbes, genes and proteins without which the more charismatic creatures wouldn’t exist at all.

J. Craig Venter, 60, a former National Institutes of Health physiologist, who led the effort to sequence and publish the human genome in 2001, is one such person. Through the institute that bears his name, he is sponsoring the second of two global expeditions by the research ship Sorcerer II to sample microbes and proteins throughout the world’s oceans and seas.

The Sorcerer II’s journeys have so far yielded a database of 6.3 million genetic base pairs and 1,700 new families of proteins, not to mention 150 new species of microbes in waters off Bermuda that were once considered a biological desert—and the searching and counting is nowhere near complete.

More here.

Douglas McGray in Wired:

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world — the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

McKinsey wanted to know if the developer, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation, could bring businesses to the island without messing up thet bird habitat. The consultants thought Gutierrez’s firm could figure it out. Gutierrez, an architect and urban designer for engineering and design giant Arup, didn’t know anything about birds. But he was a veteran of several big-city design projects in his native Chile and something of a young star at Arup’s London headquarters. The scope of the idea awed him. A whole new city? Were they serious? More important, could Arup get in on it? He quickly caught a flight to Shanghai.

Today Gutierrez and a team of Arup specialists from Europe, North America, and Asia are finalizing a plan for a scratch- built metropolis called Dongtan. Anywhere else in the world, it would have been a thought exercise, done up pretty for a design book or a museum show. But Shanghai’s economy is growing three times faster than the US economy did at the height of the dotcom boom. More than 2,000 high-rises have gone up within city limits in the past decade. The city’s most famous stretch of skyline, including the jewel-box-like Jin Mao Tower and the purple rocket-shaped Pearl TV Tower, was a rice paddy just 20 years ago. Now some 130 million people live within a two and a half hour drive of downtown. Even the wild ideas get built here.

More here.

Laura Moorhead in Wired:

“Design like you give a damn.” That’s the signature line in the rousing stump speech often delivered by Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity. While others build luxe lofts and titanium-plated monoliths, Sinclair and fellow cofounder Kate Stohr use architecture to solve social and humanitarian problems. Since starting the nonprofit in 1999, Sinclair, a 32-year-old London-born architect, and Stohr, a 32-year-old American journalist, have led 30 projects in six countries. They’ve organized design competitions for refugee housing in Kosovo, mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, and a soccer clubhouse in South Africa that doubles as an HIV/AIDS outreach center.

More here.

Review of the book “Design Like You Give a Damn” here.

Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. The motto of his group, Architecture for Humanity, is “Design like you give a damn.” Using a litany of striking examples, he shows how AFH has helped find creative solutions to humanitarian crises all over the globe. Sinclair then outlines his TED Prize wish: to create a global open-source network that will let architects and communities share and build designs to house the world.

Watch video here.

Jacob Hale Russell & John Jurgensen in The Wall Street Journal:

Paul Henry Smith, a conductor who studied as a teen under Leonard Bernstein, hopes to pull off an ambitious performance next year: conducting three Beethoven symphonies back-to-back in a live concert. “Doing Beethoven’s symphonies is how you prove your mettle,” he says.

But Mr. Smith’s proof comes with the help of a computerized baton. He will use it to lead an “orchestra” with no musicians — the product of a computer program designed by a former Vienna Philharmonic cellist and comprised of over a million recorded notes played by top musicians. …

Even some experts now find it hard to tell the difference. At the request of a Wall Street Journal reporter, David Liptak, chair of the composition department at the Eastman School of Music, listened to a 30-second passage of a Beethoven symphony created on a computer, as well as three versions recorded by live orchestras. On his first try at identifying the computerized version, Mr. Liptak guessed wrong. He says the difference became clear when he heard a longer clip (listen to the four sample passages).

More here.

Alison Gopnik at Slate:

A few months ago, a construction worker named Wesley Autrey leapt in front of a moving subway train in New York City to save a stranger who had just collapsed onto the tracks. Five days later, the New York Times speculated that this act of apparent altruism—”I just saw someone who needed help,” Autrey said—might be explained by a bunch of cells thought to exist in the human brain, called mirror neurons. …

Mirror neurons have become the “left brain/right brain” of the 21^st century. The idea that these cells could make a hero out of Wesley Autrey began with a genuine and important discovery about the brains of macaque monkeys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists found a population of cells that fired whenever a monkey prepared to act but also when it watched another animal act. They called these cells “mirror neurons.” It didn’t take long for scientists and science writers to speculate that mirror neurons might serve as the physiological basis for a wide range of social behaviors, from altruism to art appreciation. Headlines like “Cells That Read Minds” or “How Brain’s ‘Mirrors’ Aid Our Social Understanding” tapped into our intuitions about connectedness. Maybe this cell, with its mellifluous name, gives us our special capacity to understand one another—to care, to learn, and to communicate. Could mirror neurons be responsible for human language, culture, empathy, and morality?

More here.

Amy Crawford in Smithsonian Magazine:

“During Derby Week, Louisville is the capital of the world,” wrote John Steinbeck in 1956. “The Kentucky Derby, whatever it is—a race, an emotion, a turbulence, an explosion—is one of the most beautiful and violent and satisfying things I have ever experienced.”

For generations, crowds have herded to Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville on the first Saturday in May, with millions more tuning in to live television coverage. The Kentucky Derby, a 1-¼ mile race for 3-year-old Thoroughbred horses, is the longest continually held sporting event in the United States—the horses have run without interruption since 1875, even during both World Wars.

But for its first few decades, says Jay Ferguson, a curator at Louisville’s Kentucky Derby Museum, “the Derby wasn’t the horserace. Back around the turn of the century there were three horses in the race, and Churchill Downs had been losing money for every year it had been in existence.” It took savvy marketing, movie stars, southern tradition and luck to turn what could have been just another horse race into what many have called “the most exciting two minutes in sports.”

More here.