Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors were ordinary mammals that walked on land with legs. His suggestion was greeted with shock and disbelief; neverthless, scientists have found bones from ancient walking whales. Humans, Darwin argued, evolved from apes, most likely in Africa where chimpanzees and gorillas are found today. And today scientists have found about twenty different species of hominids, from chimp-like creatures that lived six million years ago to not-quite humans that lived alongside our own species. Darwin also pondered the origins of barnacles, orchids, and many other strange creatures. But for some reason–perhaps thanks to his famously weak stomach–Darwin didn’t write a single word about tapeworms. It’s a pity, because tapeworms are as strange as animals can get…

These flat, ribbon-like creatures live inside the digestive tracts of vertebrates. The tapeworms that live in humans can get up to sixty feet long…

More here.

Robert K. Elder in the Chicago Tribune:

Northwestern University had everything Nick Shultz wanted — except the right degree.

So he designed his own.

Now, the 20-year-old junior is on his way to graduating with a degree in “Criminalistics,” a curriculum he mapped out to study law, political science, physical chemistry and psychology.

What does he propose to do with his one-of-a-kind degree?

“I want to do investigative fieldwork for national-security purposes, high-profile crime cases, especially at the FBI,” he says. “They investigate all the national crimes such as serial killers.”

Shultz is among a growing number of students who design degrees that stretch convention and by turn predict emerging cultural trends.

More here.

George Johnson reviews I am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter, in Scientific American:

“You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated ‘you’ makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round,” Hofstadter writes. What blossoms from the Gödelian vortex–this symbol system with the power to represent itself–is the “anatomically invisible, terribly murky thing called I.” A self, or, to use the name he favors, a soul.

It need know nothing of neurons. Sealed off from the biological substrate, the actors in the internal drama are not things like “serotonin” or “synapse” or even “cerebrum,” “hippocampus” or “cerebellum” but abstractions with names like “love,” “jealousy,” “hope” and “regret.”

And that is what leads to the grand illusion. “In the soft, ethereal, neurology-free world of these players,” the author writes, “the typical human brain perceives its very own ‘I’ as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them.”

More here.

It wouldn’t work without Toshiro Mifune. In this role he remains perfectly Japanese but also manages to look like a mixture of Clark Gable and Gary Cooper – the sly, amused Gable of screwball comedy and the weathered Cooper of the Western. And then he looks a little like, actually prefigures, someone else, whom I’ll get to in a minute.

Mifune sometimes ambles, sometimes strides, scratches himself, shrugs one shoulder. There are lots of shots of him from the back. He seems tired without seeming done in; vaguely disreputable without being seedy. Is he dangerous? He is certainly crafty, but does he make his living by his craftiness or by his sword? He is that recurring figure in Japanese movies, the dismissed, masterless samurai. The time is 1860, pretty late for samurai in general, and the film is Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961).

more from the LRB here.

He was silly like us. Some say smelly too. There was lots to deplore about his behaviour, such as the drinking, the domineering manner and the name-dropping, and much to criticise about his life, above all the emigration to America in 1939, just as the nation stood alone. In politics, the left of his generation always mourned his renunciation of his engaged past, while contemporaries on the right deplored his homosexuality and desertion of his country.

Few writers mutilated their own work more often – for many years he deleted one of his most justly remembered lines, “We must love one another or die”, from the poem in which it occurs. Yet Wystan Hugh Auden (as he gleefully pointed out, his name was an anagram of “hug a shady wet nun”), who was born in York a century ago today, an anniversary scandalously under-recognised by a culture that thrives on less worthy commemorations, now stands as England’s greatest poet of the 20th century.

more from The Guardian here.

We’ve been quietly obsessed here at 3QD as today, Wystan Hugh Auden’s centenary, approached. In the NY Sun:

For most writers, their 100th anniversary looms like a final exam proctored by posterity. A writer who is still being read 100 years after he was born, which usually means at least 50 years after he wrote his major works, will probably keep being read into the future. But for W.H. Auden, who was born 100 years ago today, the century mark feels less like a trial than a celebration. (In fact, it is being celebrated with readings around the country, including one at the 92nd Street Y on March 5.) For when Auden died, in 1973, his immortality was already secure.

Maybe even his friends at Oxford, reading the manuscripts of his very first poems in the late 1920s, guessed that the world would not, could not, forget Auden’s voice:

Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock,

Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:

This land, cut off, will not communicate,

Be no accessory content to one

Aimless for faces rather there than here

In these lines — written in August 1927, when the poet was just 20 years old — we can already hear the tones and strategies of Auden’s first major poems. Here are the confidently mysterious addresses; the anxiety of a generation grown up between two wars; the circumambient blight that seems to attack society, industry, and the soil; even the knotted grammar, which seems to withhold its meanings like a message in a dream, or a secret code. No poet ever sounded like the early Auden, though he spawned a school of imitators. The mere fact that Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis knew Auden, and presumably were in on the secret of his sibylline verse, helped to cement their places in literary history.

The extraordinary public interest in Auden that marked his career from the beginning, and helped make him an icon of the 1930s, was more than simply admiration for a greatly talented poet. Rather, there was a general impression, in England and then in America, that Auden had been chosen by History to receive its secret messages. If his verse was obscure, with its bent grammar and dropped pronouns and private allegories, that very obscurity made it sound exceptionally urgent. He was a radio playing bulletins from the future, and if the language of those bulletins was foreign, their accent was unmistakably dire. Most of his unforgettable lines, in the first six or seven years of his career, take the form of threats and rumors: “It is time for the destruction of error”; “Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys”; “The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming.”

All of these lines were written before the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism. But they show that the 1930s — which Auden was later to name “a low, dishonest decade” — had already found their best interpreter.

This modest, wartime Auden poem seems fitting for the occassion (in Edward Mendelson, ed., The English Auden):

He watched the stars and noted birds in flight

The rivers flooded or the Empire fell:

He made predictions and was sometimes right;

His lucky guesses were rewarded well.

And fell in love with Truth before he knew her,

And rode into imaginary lands,

With solitude and fasting hoped to woo her,

And mocked those who served her with their hands.

But her he never wanted to despise,

But listened always for her voice; and when

She beckoned to him, he obeyed in meekness,

And followed her and looked into her eyes;

Saw there reflected every human weakness,

And saw himself as one of many.

From The Guardian:

Bringing up Arundhati Roy in certain Indian circles is a matter that requires great delicacy. The responses evoked are usually extreme: cat claws and meows on the one hand, or unabashed hero-worship on the other.

It wasn’t always this way. When Roy won the Booker in 1997 she was the can-do-no-wrong darling of the Indian media. Her beauty, brains and brassiness catapulted her into supersonic stardom, and the entire country, whether or not they’d read The God of Small Things, waited to see what she would come up with next.

But Roy had no immediate plans for further fiction, and turned instead to non-fiction and grassroots activism. Yet after a decade of active campaigning, Roy recently announced that she’ll be returning to fiction. Apparently, she’s tired of being “imprisoned by facts” and “having to get it right,” so she’s going back to what fiction writers do best – giving us a piece of the world the way they see it. Love it or lump it, it’s up to you.

More here.

From Time:

In Hong Kong, finding yourself lost in an impenetrable, moving mass of people is hardly rare. That’s why, in search of a subway stop on a recent Sunday, I failed to notice that I’d joined a protest march. It wasn’t until the woman next to me offered a sweet bean cake and a petition to sign that I realized that I was surrounded by Filipina women. Some 6,000 angry Filipinas, I was later to learn.

I’d only moved to Hong Kong a couple of weeks before, but already I recognized my fellow marchers. Six days a week, these migrant workers are the city’s “domestic helpers” — amahs in Cantonese — earning about $450 a month as maids, nannies and cooks in nearly 200,000 Hong Kong households. On Sundays, thousands of Filipinas take over the commercial hub, the Central district. They swarm sidewalks and elevated walkways to spend their sole day off picnicking, playing cards, singing and swapping gossip. If you linger long enough, as I did my first week, you’re sure to be offered tea and snacks.

For a couple of past Sundays, however, the amahs have also marched. They’re protesting new legislation in the Philippines that requires maids who work overseas to undergo two weeks of official training and tests. The $300 associated cost comes out of the amah’s pocket, which is what has Hong Kong’s Filipinas up in arms. They’re quick to note that they already pay the government placement fees while, at the same time, Hong Kong officials cut their minimum wage by $50 a month two years ago. “How will we afford this on our small salaries?” asks Dolores Balladares, the march’s organizer. “Our government just wants to make our lives more burdened and more miserable.”

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Guided by an unseen hand, a grimy railroad tank car negotiates a series of switch points in the tracks, veering right, then right again, then left. Next comes a lime-green box car, which makes two lefts. I observe these events from the control tower of a railroad facility called a hump yard, where freight cars sort themselves into trains bound for various destinations. It is an eerie scene. The cars glide silently downhill through the maze of tracks, seeming to steer themselves, as if each car knows just where it wants to go. This is an illusion; a computer two floors below me is making all the decisions, setting the switches a moment before each car arrives. But I can’t shake the impression that the hump yard itself is a kind of computer—that the railroad cars are executing some secret algorithm.

It’s not such a far-fetched notion. In 1994 Adam Chalcraft and Michael Greene, who were then at the University of Cambridge, and later Maurice Margenstern of the University of Metz, designed railroad layouts that simulate the operation of a computer. The machine is programmed by setting switch points in a specific initial pattern; then a locomotive running over the tracks resets some of the switches as it passes; the result of the computation is read from the final configuration of the switches.

More here.

Brian Skoloff of the AP in USA Today:

A mile offshore from this city’s high-rise condos and spring-break bars lie as many as 2 million old tires, strewn across the ocean floor — a white-walled, steel-belted monument to good intentions gone awry.

The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.

Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some of the tires that were bundled together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against a nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.

More here.

A friend takes part in this duet of Reading on a Dream.

In Geotimes:

China made history on July 1, 2006, when the Qinghai-Tibet Railway opened for passenger service. The railway is the highest-elevation passenger train in the world and the first to connect central China with Tibet, providing a controversial but arguably economically significant link between Tibet and the rest of China. Stretching about 1,142 kilometers, the railway runs from Golmud in China’s Qinghai province to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. Most of its length is above 4,000 meters in elevation, and 50 kilometers is above 5,000 meters.

The railway traverses the spectacular topography of the Tibetan Plateau, cutting across four mountain chains — Kunlun, Fenghuo, Tanggula and Nianqintanggula — where elevations of the trackbed are all above 4,600 meters. It also crosses five major rivers — the Yellow, Yangtse, Mekong (Lancang), Nujiang and Lhasa-Brahmaputra — and passes through the Three Rivers National Natural Protection Region, an area known for its biological diversity, geological and landscape variety, and scenic beauty in southwestern China.

At 4,650 meters elevation on the Tibetan Plateau, with atmospheric pressure and oxygen 45 percent lower than at sea level, an annual average air temperature of 5 degrees below zero Celsius, and extremes including low temperatures of negative 47.8 degrees Celsius and wind speeds above 30 meters per second, this is a harsh climate. Add in solar and ultraviolet radiation 1.5 to 2.5 times what it is at sea level, and not only is preconstruction research and fieldwork a challenge, but so is the construction itself.

Robert Brenner sees deep structural shifts in the US polity, in the New Left Review.

What are the prospects for this programme in the light of the Democrats’ recapture of Congress in 2006, and improved prospects for the Presidency in 2008? As we have seen, the Republicans retain a large, stable—if not quite majoritarian—electoral base; a substantial advantage in corporate funding; and, whatever the tactical differences over immediate moves in Iraq, a relative unity around a clearly defined pro-business agenda. The swing to the Democrats has largely registered a protest vote, and perhaps an abstention by Republican loyalists unable to stomach the sex and sleaze scandals of 2006. In the run-up to 2008 the Republicans, unlike the Democrats, may find it harder to modify their programme in search of votes, especially in view of Bush’s intransigeance on Iraq; an inflexibility that may leave them particularly vulnerable. Yet the fact remains that in 2006 the Republicans survived what one gop pollster called ‘the worst political environment for Republican candidates since Watergate’, and have some reason to hope for a significant rebound.

Seen against the background of the rise of the Republican right—and in view of the enhanced position of the dlc and Blue Dog caucuses within their new congressional majority—it seems likely that the Democrats will only accelerate their electoral strategy of moving right to secure uncommitted votes and further corporate funding, while banking on their black, labour and anti-war base to support them at any cost against the Republicans. This will mean further triangulation in domestic and foreign policy, but in a context significantly redefined to the right since the 1990s.

On Iraq, 29 of the Democrat candidates in the most fiercely contested congressional districts opposed setting a date for withdrawing us troops. This was, of course, in line with the overall strategy of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Rahm Emanuel in particular. Their aim is to attempt to capitalize on anti-war sentiment by doing the minimum necessary to differentiate themselves from the Republicans, while still appearing sufficiently hard-line on ‘national security’. In line with this scientific opportunism, Carl Levin, Democrat chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, put down a motion immediately after the election demanding that Bush begin redeploying troops at some unspecified date in the not too distant future, but neglecting to specify when, if ever, withdrawal should be completed. Leaving no doubt about their determination to tergiversate, House Democrats rejected Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s candidate for House majority leader, the pro-withdrawal John Murtha, in favour of the declaredly anti-withdrawal Steny Hoyer.

In its contemporary galleries, MoMA has put on view Untitled (Paperbacks), an installation by the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The room contains the plaster cast of a library interior—a ghostly imprint, or negative, of a roomful of books. It appears hollow but filled with echoes, barren but warmed by memory. In this room, the empty seems to dream of the full, the surface of the interior, the silent of the written. Whiteread has made similar casts of other places (including a room that evokes her childhood home) and they, too, appear haunted by the lost positive.

Paperbacks has become a private symbol of mine. It seems to embody the way, increasingly, I experience contemporary art. What isn’t there captivates me. Steps away from the Whiteread is a new pair of installations by Josiah McElheny that addresses the utopian dreams of the early twentieth century. Alpine Cathedral and City-Crown are two models of glistening glass buildings illuminated by changing colored lights. In provocative and subtle ways, McElheny’s piece renders the place of utopian thought in our culture. He has a certain detachment: Utopian thought is not, today, viscerally at hand. (His models date back to the work of the early-twentieth-century utopians Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut.) He compares and contrasts—utopians long for either the mountaintop or the city—and conveys the ineffable nature of dreams. The models melt and shift in the eye.

more from New York Magazine here.

David Wootton in the Times Literary Supplement:

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) was perhaps the most gifted British-born historian of the twentieth century. He began his career with a biography of Laud (1940); he ends it, posthumously, with a biography of Mayerne. In between, in his chosen field of early modern history, he produced a stream of remarkable essays, collected in four volumes, but no monograph. The book we now have, edited by his friend and literary executor Blair Worden, was mainly written in 1979, the year before Trevor-Roper retired as Regius Professor of History at Oxford. Had it been published then it would have followed close on the success of The Hermit of Peking (1976). Now, it follows close on the success of another posthumous work, Letters from Oxford.

In order to understand why this is a great book we need to start with a little-known short story by Voltaire, “The Travels of Scarmentado”, written in the spring of 1754. Scarmentado travels the world, and everywhere he goes he finds cruelties and massacres. He is living in the worst of all possible worlds. In “Scarmentado” Voltaire is inventing pessimism. Five years later, after the Lisbon earthquake and the outbreak of the Seven Years War, he was to publish Candide, or Optimism – the title, of course, is ironic – which is set firmly among contemporary events. But when he wrote “Scarmentado” he had no doubt as to the right setting for a truly pessimistic story. Scarmentado is born in 1600 and goes on his travels in 1615: the world he inhabits is the world of Theodore de Mayerne.

Mayerne was born Theodore Turquet in Geneva in 1573 – his parents were refugees from the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day, and Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, was his godfather. He studied philosophy at Heidelberg and medicine at Montpellier before pursuing an immensely successful career as a Protestant doctor in the Paris of Henri IV…

More here.

Somini Sengupta in the New York Times:

Rahul Dholakia, an Indian filmmaker and a native of the western Indian state of Gujarat, set out five years ago to make a movie about a friend who lost his son during the Gujarat riots of 2002.

This film, “Parzania,” is based on the true story of Azhar Mody, or Parzan, as he is called in the film, a 13-year-old boy who disappeared during the riots, which began after 59 Hindus died in a train fire for which a Muslim mob was initially blamed. The cause of the train fire is still unknown, though a number of politically competing investigations are looking into it. But there is little mystery in what it inspired: a Hindu-led pogrom against the Muslims of Gujarat, in which 1,100 people were killed, some by immolation, and many women were raped.

The film is now being shown in nine Indian cities, and it has received a fair amount of critical acclaim, particularly for the performance of its two leading actors, Naseeruddin Shah, who plays the father, and Sarika, who plays the mother. Time Out Mumbai credited Mr. Dholakia for having managed to “remind viewers of what really happened in 2002, and why it’s important not to forget.”

But in Gujarat, the director’s home state, theater owners have said it is too controversial and have refused to show it.

More here.

From The Atlantic Monthly:

This was the quasi-articulate attack recently leveled, by a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, on Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s account of private seminars on Nabokov for young women in Iran. The professor described Nafisi’s work as resembling “the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India,” and its author as the moral equivalent of a sadistic torturer at Abu Ghraib. “To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi,” Hamid Dabashi, who is himself of Iranian origin and believes that Nafisi’s book is a conscious part of the softening-up for an American bombing campaign in Iran, has said.

I cannot imagine my late friend Edward Said, who was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, either saying or believing anything so vulgar. And I know from experience that he was often dismayed by the views of people claiming to be his acolytes. But if there is a faction in the academy that now regards the acquisition of knowledge about “the East” as an essentially imperialist project, amounting to an “appropriation” and “subordination” of another culture, then it must be conceded that Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, was highly influential in forming this cast of mind.

Robert Irwin’s new history of the field of Oriental studies is explicitly designed as a refutation of Said’s thesis, and has an entire chapter devoted to a direct assault upon it. The author insists that he has no animus against Said personally or politically, that he tends to share his view of the injustice done to the people of Palestine, and that he regarded him as a man of taste and discernment. Irwin makes this disclaimer, perhaps, very slightly too fulsomely — at one point also recycling the discredited allegation that Said was not “really” a Palestinian from Jerusalem at all. But he is more lucid and reliable when he sets out to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of Orientalism, to defend his profession from the charge of being a conscious or unconscious accomplice of empire, and to decry the damage done by those whose reading even of Orientalism was probably superficial.

I still think that Said’s book was useful if only in forcing people in “the West” to examine the assumptions that underlay their cosmology.

More here.

From Nature:

What do you do for a living?

I’m an applied mathematician, but I work in a computer science lab [at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire]. My primary research area is developing computational and mathematical techniques to detect tampering in digital media. Most of my funding comes from law enforcement: I have a grant from the FBI. As well as doing research, I am often approached by people and organizations to help to authenticate digital media — so I’ve become something of a digital detective.

How’s business?

I get so many requests that I’ve had to start charging for my time. This dissuades many people, but many enlist my help. I’ve worked on an amazing array of cases — a prisoner had me analyse images of a crime scene, a man accused of adultery had me analyse images purportedly showing him with another woman, a doctor had me analyse images of a patient who claimed that the images had been doctored to cover up botched work. The list goes on and on. I also do quite a bit of expert-witness testimony.

More here.

Denis Peterson. Halfway to the Stars.

Acrylic and oil on canvas, air-brush.

More here and here.

Peter Hallward in the London Review of Books:

In the mid-1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country’s first democratic presidential election, with 67 per cent of the vote. He was overthrown by a military coup in September 1991 and returned to power in 1994, after the US intervened to restore democratic government. In 1996 he was succeeded by his ally René Préval. Aristide won another landslide election victory in 2000, but the resistance of Haiti’s small ruling elite eventually culminated in a second coup against him, on the night of 28 February 2004. Since then, he has been living in exile in South Africa.

According to the best available estimates, around five thousand of Aristide’s supporters have died at the hands of the regime that replaced the constitutional government. Although the situation remains tense and UN troops still occupy the country, the worst of the violence came to an end in February 2006, when after an extraordinary electoral campaign, René Préval was himself re-elected in a landslide victory. Calls for Aristide’s immediate and unconditional return continue to polarise Haitian politics. Many commentators, including several prominent members of the current government, believe that if Aristide was free to stand for re-election he would win easily.

This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006.

More here.