When he’s in the field, everyone else plays worse. How Tiger throws off golf’s incentive structure.

Joel Waldfogel in Slate:

Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well—about an extra stroke per tournament—when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, “exempt” players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger’s presence doesn’t mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35^th—there’s not much difference between the prize for 35^th and 36^th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger’s hot streaks, when his competitors’ prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors’ scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger’s well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors’ scores were unaffected by Tiger’s presence.

A skeptic might ask whether a golfer can really try harder, but in fact there are many ways for players to improve their performance in a given tournament. They can study the course. They can hit more balls on the driving range. They can arrive at the tournament a few days early and play more practice rounds.

More here.

Hitchens’s Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography is not, in fact, his latest book. (Who can keep up?) Though just out on this side of the pond, it was published a year ago in Britain, well before the blockbuster God Is Not Great. Hitchens tells us that modern revolutions eat their children—and the progeny almost included Thomas Paine. Paine wrote the first part of The Age of Reason, his critique of revealed religion and defense of deism, in a rush. He did so, as he tells us in the preface to the second part of that work, because, suspected by the Jacobins for his respect for the rule of law, he thought that his arrest was imminent—as indeed it was. On December 23, 1793, just six hours after finishing the book’s first part, he was arrested on the orders of the Committee of General Security and carted off to Paris’s Luxembourg Prison, where only by a stroke of good luck did he avoid the stroke of the guillotine. The Girondin Paine got out of prison only after Robespierre’s death, and thanks to the exertions on his behalf by the American ambassador, James Monroe.

One of Paine’s best quips (it’s not all that good) in Rights of Man is the little pun that he inserted in his account of the French nobility’s having become despised for its imbecility, thanks to the inevitable result of the principle of heredity. Such, says Paine, is “the general character of aristocracy, or what are called the Nobles, or Nobility, or rather No-ability, in all countries.” Hitchens seems to prefer another Paine quip to the same effect—that the idea of hereditary legislators is as absurd as the idea of hereditary mathematicians—but Paine most likely didn’t coin this one himself, since Franklin used it to describe the House of Lords in his Journal of Negotiations in London, written while aboard ship to America in March 1775. On equality and the hereditary principle, Franklin, Paine, and Hitchens are three peas in a pod.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The number of sequenced human genomes will soon swell to more than 1,000 as part of a new international research consortium’s effort to trace the potential genetic origins of disease. But first the mother, father and adult child of a European-ancestry family from Utah and a Yoruba-ancestry family from Nigeria will join an anonymous individual as well as famous geneticists Craig Venter and James Watson as part of the handful of humans to have on record a complete readout of their roughly three billion pairs of DNA. And these six will also each have their genetic codes examined at least 20 times, providing 10 times the accuracy of existing genetic sequences as well as paving the way for the ambitious effort dubbed the 1,000 Genomes Project, which will comprehensively map humanity’s genetic variation.

The project will proceed in three steps, according to the consortium. The first, currently underway and expected to be completed by year’s end, is the detailed scanning of the six individuals. This will be followed by less detailed genome scans of 180 anonymous people from around the world and then partial scans of an additional 1,000 people. “If we look at about 1,000 individuals, we’ll get genetic variants in those samples that are somewhere around 1 percent or lower frequency” in the human population, says geneticist Lisa Brooks, director of the Bethesda, Md.–based National Human Genome Research Institute’s Genetic Variation Program.

More here.

Birches 
Robert Frost 

When I see birches bend to left and right 
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows–
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Todd Ackerman in the Houston Chronicle:

A Houston hospital known for seeking the most advanced cancer therapies that modern science can develop is turning its attention to a centuries-old Chinese treatment: toad venom.

Scientists from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are investigating whether the stuff that some types of toads use to sicken their natural predators can also be a healer, as doctors of traditional Chinese medicine have long believed.

“Without hesitation, toad venom was the No. 1 drug (Chinese) doctors mentioned when we asked them to suggest the best natural cancer medicines to test,” Lorenzo Cohen, director of M.D. Anderson’s integrative medicine program, said from China. “It may sound wild to Americans, but it’s accepted as a standard of care here.”

It also appears to hold promise. In clinical trials Cohen is leading in Shanghai, the venom secreted by the Asiatic toad has shown some benefit and no apparent side effects in patients with advanced liver, pancreatic and lung cancer — which are not easy cancers to fight.

Cohen said he hopes to bring the drug to Houston to test on M.D. Anderson patients in a couple of years. It already has been tested successfully in laboratory and mouse studies at the cancer center.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Eric D. Lehman at Empty Mirror Books:

The modern fables that make up Bill Ectric’s new collection of stories, Time Adjusters, are difficult to classify, in the best way possible. They seem a comic-book mishmash of science fiction and magical realism, one turn of the screw toward another world. At first, the author paints a suburban landscape where pet baboons chase children through the streets, and we are not sure whether this isn’t our world after all. Readers get multiple perspectives, disturbing our sense of reality further, leaving us with small growths on our analytical minds that may or may not be benign.

And then, Mr. Ectric turns the screw one more time for stories like “Time Adjusters,” inserting elements like an attacking Neanderthal imported through a time gateway. And yet, this still does not happen in a fantastic world beyond imagination, but in the smiling environs of Insurance Co. Often, the real stories take place in a character’s mind, and amidst all this narrative chaos, the reader is led astray. When I read the “The Little Robot,” a deceptively simple story about a young boy who uses his robot as a rosary, I had no idea where the story was going. Who knows what could happen — the robot could burst alive or the little boy could transform into a machine. Ectric plays with our expectations, and so when we are left with a sad but powerful story about the human capacity for belief, we are surprised and gratified.

More here.

PD Smith at Kafka’s Mouse:

One of the most memorable moments in Robert Musil’s disturbing novel about adolescent angst, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906; trans. Young Törleß), is when the troubled protagonist lies down in the grounds of his school and gazes up at the deep blue autumn sky. It is as if Törleß is seeing sky for the first time and he is shocked by its unfathomable depths:

“He felt it must be possible, if only one had a long, long ladder, to climb up and into it. But the further he penetrated, raising himself on this gaze, the further the blue, shining depth receded. And still it was as though some time it must be reached, as though by sheer gazing one must be able to stop it and hold it. The desire to do this became agonizingly intense.”

For Törleß, this encounter with the infinite comes to represent the ambiguity of experience and ultimately the inexpressible nature of reality. As Götz Hoeppe’s excellent history of our attempts to explain the blue of the sky shows, from moments of wonder like these, scientific theories grow.

More here.

Via DeLong, impressions solicited:

On the day before the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Senator Barack Obama delivers a speech to the congregation of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia

From Geotimes:

In the spring of 2006, a team of divers descended into the turquoise waters of the Red Sea, just offshore of one of the limestone islands in the Farasan Islands archipelago. Outfitted with cameras, measuring tapes and special deep-sea scuba gear, the team wasn’t there to admire the colorful corals or vibrant fish that attract most divers to the island chain located 40 kilometers off Saudi Arabia’s southwestern coastline. Instead, they were searching for a rare treasure: submerged traces of our ancestors’ journey out of Africa.

The human fossil record and studies of human genetic diversity agree on the origins of our species: Sometime nearly 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged in Africa. Then, by 50,000 years ago, a group of these modern humans ventured from their African homeland into the unknown. Descendants of these early explorers eventually made their way across the entire globe, yet the oldest-known successful human population outside of Africa comes from an unlikely place — Australia, where human fossils show our ancestors reached the island continent by at least 45,000 years ago. This fossil evidence and studies of genetics together suggest that humans headed to India and the isolated islands of the Indian Ocean before migrating into Europe or northern Asia tens of thousands of years later. The exact route these early humans used to leave Africa, however, is debated.

More here.

Brigitte Frase in The Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Judith Thurman’s book of essays possesses the three cardinal virtues of nonfiction: Its prose is stylish and often witty; it delves into various topics with hungry curiosity, and it is very, very intelligent. Thurman takes her subjects seriously, giving the same respect and in-depth analysis to “Hump the Grinder’s Hair Wars” as she does to the novels of Gustave Flaubert.

All but one of the pieces were first published in the New Yorker magazine over the past 20 years. They begin as reviews — of books, art, fashion — and then ripen and deepen into psychologically astute essays. As the biographer of two complex, often maddening women — Isak Dinesen and Colette — Thurman became a wily and resourceful spy in the domain of desire: our hungers for sex and love, of course, but also for attention, power, danger, catharsis, degradation, self-erasure, for new sensations, for beauty or perfection, and also for the despoilment of beauty and perfection, without which there can be no eroticism.

Her chosen subjects, a majority of them women, do not traipse lightly through the world. They are furies, fearless explorers of human frontiers, inventors of theatrical selves. Take Diane Arbus, the subject of “Exposure Time.” She was greedy for experiences of the uncanny. Her photographs of misfits, whether handicapped, loony, hideous or merely sad, have the power to profoundly trouble and implicate the viewer; we can’t help staring. Why did they consent to pose? “Everyone with a true and false self secretly knows the answer. The yearning for love is, in part, a desire to become visible as one really is to the Other, though every time one dares to let oneself be seen, one risks being seen through.”

More here.

The editors of Scientific American:

They call it the tera­scale. It is the realm of physics that comes into view when two elementary particles smash together with a combined energy of around a trillion electron volts, or one tera-electron-volt. The machine that will take us to the terascale—the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—is now nearing completion.

To ascend through the energy scales from electron volts to the tera­scale is to travel from the familiar world through a series of distinct landscapes: from the domains of chemistry and solid-state electronics (electron volts) to nuclear reactions (millions of electron volts) to the territory that particle physicists have been investigating for the past half a century (billions of electron volts)..

What lies in wait for us at the tera­scale? No one knows.

But radically new phenomena of one kind or another are just about guaranteed to occur. Scientists hope to detect long-sought particles that could help complete our understanding of the nature of matter. More bizarre discoveries, such as signs of additional dimensions, may unfold as well.

More here.  [Thanks to Scott Rosenblum.]

This is getting very little press attention in the West. From Al-Jazeera:

The one-and-a-half million Palestinians in Gaza are struggling to cope amid power cuts as Israel continues its fuel blockade of the territory.

The shutdown of Gaza’s only power plant has prompted fears of a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Moaiya Hassanain, a health ministry official, said: “We have the choice to either cut electricity on babies in the maternity ward or heart surgery patients or stop operating rooms.”

Gaza City awoke on Monday to find bread shops and petrol stations closed.

Frederik Pleitgen at CNN:

She said her main political goal is to empower Pakistan‘s largely disenfranchised masses and end what she calls the perpetual cycle of “dynastic” cronyism.

What her role would be in making that happen remains the great unknown.

“What I think we need to do is open the field,” said Fatima Bhutto, who went to college in the United States and graduate school in England. “It has to stop being this autocratic, dynastic environment. … When that day comes and this happens — that we have an open field — if there’s a way for me to serve this country, then I would be proud to.”

Until then, she said, she exerts her power from her writing. Fatima Bhutto is a successful columnist, author and poet; a staunch critic of Pervez Musharraf‘s government. And though her name would probably propel her to the highest levels of Pakistani politics almost instantly, she said that won’t happen anytime soon.

More here.

On Watch
Harry Walsh

Some watches at sea
I was so alert
I could see things before they appeared.
Sensing pending arrivals
I would watch a point
on the horizon
until certainly a mast was there,
a needle point of light,
or dawn.
Once I stared at a spot
on the surface of the ocean
beneath which I knew
A whale waited.
I have watched stars
by concentrating on an empty
and dark place in the night.
Watched doors, windows
and miles
waiting for someone
invisible always
but for the turbulence of their passing.

From Outlook India:

Gore Vidal, Ian McEwan, Fatima Bhutto, Dev Anand, Kamila Shamsie, Aamir Khan, Indra Sinha, Manil Suri, William Dalrymple, Aparna Sen, Gurcharan Das, Donna Tartt, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Nayantara Sahgal, Kunal Basu, Jaishree Misra, Mahesh Dattani, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Namita Devidayal, Uday Prakash, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Anoushka Shankar, Anita Nair, Sudha Murthy, Moni Mohsin, Miranda Seymour, Ambarish Satwick, Pavan Varma, Arun Maira, Tishani Doshi, Sarnath Banerjee, Ira Pande, David Godwin, Jeet Thayil, Aruna Roy, Shahbano Bilgrami, Christopher Hampton, Himanshu Joshi

Literary agent Mita Kapur, one of the organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival, has never felt more like a harassed travel agent. For a litfest that started with a single writer addressing a dozen readers in a poky little room at the local university four years ago, the Jaipur litfest has come a long way. This year, for example, the litfest has not only managed to raise over Rs 1.35 crore from a variety of sponsors, including banks, breweries, airlines and a construction company, but has also bagged two of the world’s best-known literary stars: Gore Vidal and Ian McEwan, besides nearly a hundred writers from the subcontinent, and publishers and agents from India as well as UK, France, Norway and China.

Just how irresistible this mix of work and play has proved is apparent from the steady stream of inquiries still pouring in at the festival headquarters in Jaipur. Among the last-minute confirmations are Fatima Bhutto and Aamir Khan. Several more, including Indra Sinha, Kamila Shamsie, music memoirist Namita Devidayal and ‘tree man’ Pradip Krishen were squeezed into parallel events at a newly-sponsored tent by Outlook for readings. Dozens of writers who wanted to be part of the programme had to be turned away with a promise to be accommodated next year. Dozens more, including Amartya Sen and Ramachandra Guha, decided to take rain checks for next year because of their schedules. It has turned out to be the season’s most fashionable squeeze.

More here.

In signandsight, a look at the impact of Jan Tomasz Gross’s new book “Fear”:

In recent days a new chapter in the emotional debate over Polish anti-Semitism has opened in Poland. The occasion is the Polish edition of a new book by the Princeton historian of Polish origin Jan Tomasz Gross. The book with the punchy title “Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz” (New York 2006) revolves around a central question: “How was Polish anti-Semitism possible after Auschwitz?” According to the reports by Holocaust survivors cited by the author, rather than being welcomed with open arms, Polish Holocaust survivors were met in their hometowns by the cynical question “Are you still alive?!”

The Holocaust victims were confronted with more or less open hostility on the part of the Polish population, which ultimately ended in pogroms. Gross’ book examines three of these in detail, in Rzeszow (1945), Krakow (1945) and the most notorious pogrom in Kielce (1946) in which 37 Jews were murdered.

For Gross, neither the allegedly widespread participation of Polish Jews in the slowly consolidating Communist regime nor the horror stories circulating about the ritual murder of Christian children were the real reasons for these occurrences. Ultimately, economic interests were behind the events. Many Poles had taken possession of Jewish property after the German occupiers fled, and the Holocaust survivors’ return was perceived as a real threat. Regardless of the pretexts for the pogroms, Gross writes, their real purpose was to get rid of the inconvenient victims.

Matt Kaplan is ScienceNOW:

Talk about “gaydar.” In just a fraction of a second, people can accurately judge the sexual orientation of other individuals by glancing at their faces, according to new research. The finding builds on the growing theory that the subconscious mind detects and probably guides much more of human behavior than is realized.

Humans are remarkably good at making snap judgments about others. In a hallmark study conducted by psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in 1994, people shown 2-second video clips of professors teaching formed opinions about the professors’ teaching abilities that were uncannily similar to evaluations written by students at the end of a semester. The results led psychologists to begin questioning what else people might detect in a glance.

Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation. They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers were less accurate at shorter durations, and their accuracy did not get better at durations beyond 100 milliseconds, the team reports in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. “What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results,” says Ambady.

In the NYRB:

Distance requires formality, but I cannot be distant writing about Lizzie Hardwick since everything has come alarmingly closer—the curls, the infectious chuckles, the drawl like poured-out honey, the privilege of sharing her astute delight, and the benign devastations of her wit. Because she hated pomposity she was more fun than any American writer I have known. She preferred gaiety to malice and had the laugh to go with it. Memories of her rise like butterflies from a bush, all darting, elate, and light; the use of three adjectives is the signature of her style, perhaps because of the precise languor of her Kentucky accent.

That meter entered her husband’s poems and Cal sometimes sounded as if he were talking in Elizabeth’s voice, as Robert Lowell blended into Elizabeth Hardwick.

Slovenian philosopher and social critic Slavoj Zizek has long been known as the enfant terrible of the intellectual world, but some might wonder if even he hasn’t now gone too far. It was not enough that, as conventional wisdom was announcing with finality the death of Communism and dismissing with contempt anything related to the old Soviet Union, Zizek would publish a book proclaiming the need for “Repeating Lenin”. But now, in a book with a guillotine appropriately emblazoned on the cover, he has decided to champion boldly the legacy of the Reign of Terror’s own Maximilien Robespierre. The central theme of Zizek’s recent work on Lenin, Robespierre and the topic of totalitarianism is the necessity of “the Act”. Some observers might be tempted to ask whether his entire intellectual oeuvre is also some kind of act.

more from Eurozine here.

No one can hear what the figure is muttering to the wall. If you lean close, you can watch his lips moving, but he’s not saying anything. This proximity is intimidating, perhaps more for us than for him. There is a sense of having invaded the sculpture’s space. Illuminated by a powerful spotlight, the figure casts a long, distorted shadow on the wall. Some distance away, another man, seated at a table, turns to listen. He looks as though he is about to demand that the other one speak up. He, too, casts a shadow, just as we cast ours among theirs. In another room, another figure raises his arms and delights in his own monstrous shadow projected before him. All of us, it strikes me now, are shadow puppets, actors and make-believe.

Juan Muñoz made no attempt to convince us that these are real people, not sculptures, except by providing one figure with a mechanism beneath his silicon skin to work his lips.

more from The Guardian here.