John Allen Paulos at ABC News:

Last year’s wildly popular Beyond Belief 1.0 scientific conference primarily focused upon and championed irreligion. The Beyond Belief 2.0 conference held at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., this past November was wider in scope. Rather than aiming to be another undiluted atheist lovefest, it attempted to consider changes in the ideas of the Enlightenment that are necessary given advances in various disciplines since the 18th century.

At least that was the stated aim, but any gathering that included the diverse luminaries in attendance would be guaranteed to roam all over the intellectual landscape. Despite the roaming and the diversity, however, the conference remained — pardon the adolescent alliteration — an unbeliever’s utopia, a heathen’s heaven, a pagan’s paradise.

The complete video of the conference proceedings is available online HERE, and I urge readers to view it and related material for themselves. The video’s marquee names include philosophers Daniel Dennett, David Albert and Patricia Churchland, physical scientists Stuart Kauffman, Sean Carroll and Harold Kroto, biologists and cognitive scientists V.S. Ramachandran, David Sloan Wilson, Lee Silver and host Roger Bingham, writers Rebecca Goldstein, David Brin and Robert Winter, various stars, such as Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers and Michael Shermer, and a host of others.

More here.  And read an excerpt from Paulos’s new book Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up here. Reviews of the book are here.  I have read the book and recommend it very highly. Buy it here.

From American Scientist:

Prepared by math professor Larry Riddle of Atlanta’s Agnes Scott College, this well-organized site presents the biographies of 184 notable women in mathematics, from Theano, who carried on the Calabrian school of her husband Pythagoras after his death, to Ukrainian mathematician Svetlana Jitomirskaya, whose work on non-perturbative quasiperiodic localization received the American Mathematical Society’s Satter Prize in 2005.

The biographies are well composed and referenced, and Riddle has provided both alphabetical and chronological indexes, the latter of which provides a useful timeline of women’s recognized contributions to mathematics since the sixth century B.C.

There’s also a well-maintained list of links to external resources that support and recognize women’s contributions in mathematics, science and engineering—a valuable starting point for those who want to explore further.

Professor Riddle’s site is here.  [Photo shows Svetlana Jitomirskaya.]

From NoUtopia:

A Thank You Note
Wislawa Szymborska

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

I don’t wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.

They don’t even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them anything”,
love would have said
on this open topic.

From India Profile:

Every year the Shia Muslims commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. For ten days the people mourn the death of the Imam, his family and followers. They wear black, attend meetings and carry out processions to express their grief.

It was in Karbala where Hussein fought his last battle and died. “Put your trust in God and know that man is born to die, and that the heavens shall not remain, everything shall pass away, except the presence of God.” Those were Hussein’s passing words to his old weeping sister before he washed, anointed himself with musk and rode his horse into the face of thousands of soldiers. The place where the water of Euphrates was cut off to Hussein and his family came to be known as Kerbala (Kerb meaning anguish and bela vexation. Hussein refused to bow to the forces of evil choosing a bloody death. His spirit rose like a phoenix and flew across lands away from the desert of his home. Evoking the strength and humility of Hussein wrote Anees, the poet, master of elegy: “Yeh to na keh sakey kay Shah-e-zulmanain hoon, Maula ne sur jhuka ke kaha main Hussein hoon` (He never could say he was master of earth and sky. He merely bent low his head and said ‘I am Hussein’).

More here.

Laila Lalami in The Los Angeles Times:

Yalo by Elias Khoury

Few cities have withstood the kind of violence and carnage that Beirut has. Though destroyed by a civil war lasting 15 long years, it seemed to be on the verge of an economic and cultural renaissance in 2006 when it was bombed again during the Israeli invasion. Beirut is a city that has learned to start over, to rebuild itself on top of its ruins, but it is also a place where memories are long and myths are persistent. In his new novel, Yalo, Elias Khoury grapples with the idea of truth and memory, what we choose to remember and what we prefer to forget. In fact, Yalo is composed of confessions — whether forced or voluntary, true or laced with self-aggrandizement, redemptive for the confessor or entirely useless.

Khoury was born in Beirut’s Ashrafiyyeh district (also known as “Little Mountain”) at a crucial historical moment: 1948, the year that witnessed the founding of the state of Israel and the resulting dispossession that Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”). These twin events have had a profound significance for him as a novelist, playwright, journalist and literary critic. In 1967, at age 19, he visited Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, and, revolted by what he saw, he enrolled in Fatah, the largest political faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Three years later, in the aftermath of Black September, he left Jordan for Paris, where he finished his college education. With Yalo, Khoury returns to Beirut in the 1980s with a book that is a series of jagged narratives shifting in time, location and point of view. The novel gives us, like pieces of a puzzle, the story of Daniel Jal’u, nicknamed Yalo. He is a soldier who, after 10 years spent on one of the many sides of Lebanon’s sectarian civil war, gradually becomes a deserter, a thief, a vagabond in Paris, a night watchman in Beirut, a traitor to his benefactor, an arms smuggler, a voyeur and eventually a rapist. Then Yalo falls in love with the young Shirin, and that single act of affection ends in his capture; she turns him in to the police and accuses him of rape.

More here.

Stanley Fish continues on the value of the humanities over at his NYT blog.

Of the justifications for humanistic study offered in the comments, two seemed to me to have some force. The first is that taking courses in literature, philosophy and history provides training in critical thinking. I confess that I have always thought that “critical thinking” is an empty phrase, a slogan that a humanist has recourse to when someone asks what good is what you do and he or she has nothing to say. What’s the distinction, I have more than occasionally asked, between critical thinking and just thinking? Isn’t the adjective superfluous? And what exactly would “uncritical thinking” be? But now that I have read the often impassioned responses to my column, I have a better understanding of what critical thinking is.

Joseph Kugelmass responds again over at The Valve.

If by “critical thinking” one means merely the capacity for analysis, and the willingness to analyze something independently, then it is true that other venues besides the academy produce critical thinking. Nonetheless, skills specific to the interpretation and production of texts differ in enormous ways from the skills specific to the analysis of sports events. Otherwise, every head coach would also be a Cicero.

This variance obtains with each of the spurious alternatives you present to us here. Talk radio, while marginally interactive (since one caller at a time can speak to the host), imposes such limits on the level of the conversation that I’m frankly amazed you would compare it to a college seminar. Political analysis is rarely interactive at all: just watching a pundit talk does not produce skilled, independent political thought.

3QD friend Sam Anderson has won one of the country’s most prestigious awards for book criticism. At the NY Magazine website:

[F]or us the best surprise of all wasn’t one of the book nominations; it was the announcement that New York‘s book critic, Sam Anderson, was the winner of the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, the most prestigious award for book criticism in the country. Good work, Sam!

For those of you who don’t know Sam’s writing, here are two excellent pieces.  Also, from Sam’s list of 2007’s best books:

9. MOST TRAGIC FIGURE
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
Danticat’s uncle Joseph lost his wife to illness, his larynx to cancer, his home and church (and almost his head) to a Haitian mob—until finally, at 81, he fled to Miami, where he was finished off by the hellishly inept bureaucracy of U.S. Immigration: detained, interrogated, and allowed to die in custody. Danticat tells his story with almost inhuman restraint.

Dennis Overbye in the NYT:

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit.

Sean Carroll elucidates over at Cosmic Variance:

The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology — one in which the low-entropy universe we see is a statistical fluctuation around an equilibrium state of maximal entropy. According to this argument, in such a universe you would see every kind of statistical fluctuation, and small fluctuations in entropy would be enormously more frequent than large fluctuations. Our universe is a very large fluctuation (see previous post!) but a single brain would only require a relatively small fluctuation. In the set of all such fluctuations, some brains would be embedded in universes like ours, but an enormously larger number would be all by themselves. This theory, therefore, predicts that a typical conscious observer is overwhelmingly likely to be such a brain. But we (or at least I, not sure about you) are not individual Boltzmann brains. So the prediction has been falsified, and that kind of theory is not true.

In the LRB, Simon Blackburn, Jerry Coyne, Philip Kitcher, Tim Lewens, Steven Rose pen a joint response to Jerry Fodor’s response to letters on the issue:

Jerry Fodor persists with two provocative claims: first, that natural selection explanations are incoherent; second, that there is some alternative explanation for adaptive phenomena such as camouflage or beak shape (Letters, 29 November).

To show the incoherence of anything, you have to address it in the form in which its professional expositors deploy it. In large numbers of articles and books, published from 1859 to the present, evolutionary biologists use the following style of explanation. A characteristic of an organism (the colour of an animal’s coat, say) is as it is because of a historical process. In some ancestral population there was a variant type that differed from the rest in ways that enhanced reproductive success. (White polar bears, for example, more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.) If the variant has a genetic basis, its frequency increases in the next generation.

Is this incoherent? Nothing Fodor says bears on that question.

Fodor:

[T]hey offer some potted polar bear history: ‘White polar bears . . . more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.’ I don’t know whether this story is true (neither, I imagine, do they), but let’s suppose it is. They ask, rhetorically, whether I think it’s incoherent. Well, of course I don’t, but that’s because they’ve somehow left out the Darwin bit. To get it back in, you have to add that the white bears were selected ‘because of’ their improved camouflage, and that the white bears were ‘selected for’ their improved camouflage: i.e. that the improved camouflage ‘explains’ why the white bears survived and flourished. But now we get the incoherence back too. What Darwin failed to notice (and what paradigm adaptationists continue to fail to notice) is that the theory of natural selection entails none of these. In fact, the theory of natural selection leaves it wide open what (if anything) the white bears were selected for.

What a difference a decade makes. When I worked in Moscow in 1994 and 1995 for the National Democratic Institute, an American nongovernmental organization, I could not have imagined the present situation. The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be considered the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” as Putin claims, would have occurred to only a few hard-core, extremist (loony) Communist Party members. Suddenly, this view is not only mainstream but is shared by the youngest generation of Russians— even as they drink Starbucks coffee while surfing the Internet. Alongside Big Macs and iPods, a cottage industry of Soviet nostalgia has sprung up, complete with T-shirts, books, movies, bars, and restaurants. Stores even sell postcards of Stalin.

If Russians feel nostalgia for Soviet days, the run-up to the December elections stirred my own memories of a year of living not at all dangerously in what we thought of then as the new Russia. My thoughts, and those of so many others, go back to the era not only in Russia but also in the United States— the 12 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The United States’s efforts to promote democracy abroad had not yet become singed by the war in Iraq, and the democratic balance in its three branches of government seemed reasonably stable.

more from The American Scholar here.

Mr. Kirsch’s method as a critic differs sharply from the one prevalent among writers on poetry, many of whom feel the need to take a side in the argument between believers in the expressive, communicative, imitative power of poetry, and those who believe it is a medium whose meaning is internal, closed in its own horizon, constructed and conditioned solely by the inner tensions of any particular poem. (It’s odd that these views are seen as opposed.)

But Mr. Kirsch takes poets on in their own terms, reading them by their own lights even as he locates them in the poetic tradition — in particular their relation to the Romantics, a relationship he sees as key to understanding contemporary poetry. This is not merely to say Mr. Kirsch is gentle or ecumenical, but rather that he understands the difficulty of writing about poems, even the longest and most perfectly composed of which are fleet, fragmented, and elusive in a way particularly inhospitable to the kind of scrutiny that novels and essays bear up so well under. When Mr. Kirsch praises, he does not praise first and foremost in the service of any critical ideology.

more from The NY Sun here.

Has any pop group’s comeback been analysed as much as that of the Spice Girls? Plumb the newspapers since their reunion tour began in Vancouver on 2 December, and Mel B, Mel C, Geri Halliwell, Emma Bunton and the ubiquitous Victoria Beckham have been labelled the lot: they are washed-up old crones, backbiting bitches, merciless money-grubbers, Top 40 turkeys – their comeback ballad “Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)” only reached number 11 – and a short-frocked, sloganeering riot squad who destroyed feminism for ever. Unpacking girl power in the Observer, the critic Kitty Empire protested, “Has there ever been a redder herring?” Before seeing the show, I’d have agreed. Afterwards, despite a less-than-consummate performance from the Girls, I wasn’t so sure.

more from The New Statesman here.

For Ga:

For Aps:

I cry with you. We will never forget.

Bachey to aglay baras hum hein aur yeh gham phir hai
Jo chal basay to yeh apna salam-e-akhir hai

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

In the spring of 1863, Lord & Taylor in New York, down on Ladies’ Mile, opened a “mourning store,” where the new widows of the Civil War could dress their grief in suitable fashion. Some idea of what they shopped for is apparent from the inventory advertised by Besson & Son, in Philadelphia, a mourning store of the same period: “Black Crape Grenadines / Black Balzerines / Black Baryadere Bareges / Black Bareges.” The Civil War dead are still among us—long after their beautifully dressed widows have passed away—and the problem is how to get them buried. The acceptable thing to say now, as it was then, is that the soldiers, and their sacrifice, are what remain to inspire us. But it’s the corpses that haunt us, not the soldiers, as they haunted us then, and no amount of black crêpe can cover them over. The scale of the dying disillusioned a country, and also, as Lincoln saw, gave us a country—turned a provisional arrangement of states into a modern nation. A few new books attempt to place the dying in the right context: What did people of the time make of all that dying? More provocatively, did those who died in some sense want to die, and, most provocative, did so many die, after all?

Drew Gilpin Faust, the Civil War historian who is also the new president of Harvard, has published what will probably be the central book in this accounting: “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” (Knopf; $27.95). Her argument is that the scale of the killing between 1861 and 1865 demanded a new cult of memory—a new set of social rituals, some rooted in the Bible, but many intensely secular, the rituals of Republican mourning. These rituals—the response to the mass killing, from military cemeteries, neatly rowed, to a taste for tight-lipped prose—made us what we are. The embalming fluid developed at the time by Yankee ingenuity to preserve dead bodies on their way home from the battlefield still runs through our veins.

More here.

From Science:

Donated hearts for lifesaving transplants are scarce, but now researchers may have hit upon a way to generate the blood-pumping organs in the lab–at least in rats. The approach, which involves transplanting cells from a newborn rat onto the framework of an adult heart, produced an organ that could beat and pump fluid. Further refinement will be necessary before the technique is ready for people, but it could also generate other organs.

Taylor’s team started with a heart removed from an adult rat. The researchers soaked it in chemicals to remove the living cells, leaving behind a “skeleton” composed of the heart’s nonliving structural tissues, which are made of proteins and other molecules. Onto this scaffolding the researchers placed heart cells from a newborn rat, which are not stem cells but can give rise to multiple types of tissue. The cells took to their new home and after 8 days had assembled into a functioning heart that beat and pumped fluid, the researchers reported online 13 January in Nature Medicine. The new organ had only 2% of the pumping force of an adult heart, but Taylor says that she and her colleagues have since repeated the procedure with about 40 hearts and found that they can produce a stronger organ by adding more cells and giving them more time to grow.

More here.

Daido Moriyama. Midnight. 1986.

Gelatin silver print.

More on this photographer of the streets of Tokyo here and here.

Lensculture essay on a newly published collection “Eyes of an Island: Japanese Photography 1945-2007” here.

Over at the Freakanomics blog, Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for A Day, looks at some gang member responses to HBO’s The Wire.

For the first episode, we gathered in the Harlem apartment of Shine, a 43-year-old half Dominican, half African-American man who managed a gang for fifteen years before heading to prison for a ten-year drug trafficking sentence. I invited older guys like Shine, most of whom had retired from the drug trade, because they would have greater experience with rogue cops, political toughs, and everyone else that makes The Wire so appealing. They affectionately named our gathering “Thugs and ‘Cuz.” (I was told that the “‘cuz” — short for “cousin” — was for me.)… Here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of the evening’s highlights:

1. The Bunk is on the take. Much to my chagrin (since he is my favorite character), the consensus in the room was that the Bunk was guilty. In the words of Shine, “He’s too good not to be profiting. I got nothing against him! But he’s definitely in bed with these street [thugs].” Many had known of Bunk’s prowess as a detective from past episodes. The opening scene, in which he craftily obtains a confession, reinforced their view that the Bunk is too good not to be hiding something.

2. Prediction No. 1: McNulty and the Bunk will split. The observation regarding Bunk’s detective work led to a second agreement, namely that McNulty or Bunk will be taken down — shot, arrested, or killed. This was closely tied to the view that McNulty and Bunk will come into conflict. The rationale? Everyone felt that Marlo, Proposition Joe, or another high-ranking gang leader must have close (hitherto unexplained) ties with one of these two detectives.

First at the Independent (UK) (via richarddawkins.net):

An internationally renowned biologist has shocked colleagues by abandoning the established explanation for why insects appear to display altruistic behaviour.

For the last 40 years researchers have more or less agreed that most ants, bees and wasps forego reproduction to help raise another’s offspring in order to help spread the genes they share.

The theory, known as “kin selection”, was first proposed in 1955 by biologist J. B. S. Haldane, and more famously expressed in Richard Dawkin’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Now however Prof Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard University, the renowned father of the field of socio-biology and a world expert on social insects, has amazed colleagues by renouncing it.

Wilson suggests something else at play, (Brandon Keim in Wired):

Only by conceiving of evolution as acting upon entire populations rather than individual organisms can we understand eusociality — the mysterious, seemingly “altruistic” behaviors exhibited by insects who forego reproduction in order to care for a colony’s young.

So says Edward O. Wilson, the legendary sociobiologist, environmentalist and entomologist, in an article published in the January issue of Bioscience. Wilson doesn’t extrapolate from bugs to people, but his conclusions raise fascinating questions about the evolutionary aspects of non-reproducing humans.

Dawkins responds:

EDWARD WILSON has given us a characteristically fascinating account of the evolution of social insects (see page 6 and BioScience, vol 58, p 17). But his “group selection” terminology is misleading, and his distinction between “kin selection” and “individual direct selection” is empty. What matters is gene selection.

All we need ask of a purportedly adaptive trait is, “What makes a gene for that trait increase in frequency?” Wilson wrongly implies that explanations should resort to kin selection only when “direct” selection fails. Here he falls for the first of my “12 misunderstandings of kin selection (pdf)“, that is, he thinks it is a special, complex kind of natural selection, which it is not (Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, vol 51, p 184).

Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen over at The Immanent Frame:

Why is it that sex is such a central part of American political life anyway? Why, when The New York Times reported on the influence of “values” voters on the 2004 Presidential election, did the Times name only two “values,” both of them reflecting a conservative sexual ethic: opposition to abortion and opposition to “recognition of lesbian and gay couples”?

This conflation of values and sexuality is particularly important because the polls on which the claim was based did not name any values, but just asked people to rate values in relation to other issues like the economy. In addition, the number of voters choosing values in this poll had actually fallen from a high point in 1996, when Bill Clinton was re-elected. But, the Times was willing not only to accept and promote the idea that values voters had swung the election, but also to promote the idea that the values these voters cared about were sexual in nature and conservative in force. Although there was subsequent criticism of the Times’s conclusion that voters in 2004 were more concerned with “values” than were voters in previous elections, there was little to no criticism of the presumption that “values” equals “sexuality,” and conservative sexuality at that.

Here, then, is another echo of the concern Taylor raises. The Reformation makes sexuality a matter of intense ethical concern, standing in for—and sometimes even blocking out—other concerns about the ideal moral life, such as whether it should be lived through a commitment to poverty.

Via TPM Cafe, Marjorie Valbrun in the Washington Post?

Last month, William Shaheen, a political surrogate for Clinton, was quoted publicly peddling concerns about Obama’s admitted past drug use and intimating that Republicans — not, heaven forbid, candidate Clinton herself — would raise questions about it if Obama was nominated.

Shaheen, who was co-chairman of the New Hampshire campaign but has since resigned, told The Post: “It’ll be: ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’ There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”

What’s harder to overcome is the idea that these patently insincere sentiments about Obama — coming from an experienced political adviser working for a tightly controlled and heavily scripted campaign — weren’t part of a deliberate attempt to paint the Illinois senator as a stereotypical black drug dealer.

Clinton herself has made racially tinged comments that could be taken as either insensitive or patronizing. The most widely noticed was in her efforts to dismiss Obama’s talk of “hope” and “change” as empty idealism. In doing so, she offhandedly diminished the important role played by Martin Luther King Jr. in pushing America to meet its promise of equality for millions of black Americans. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Clinton said. “It took a president to get it done.”

In other words, “I have a dream” is a nice sentiment, but King couldn’t make it reality. It took a more practical and, of course, white president, Lyndon Johnson, to get blacks to the mountaintop. Of course no black man could have hoped to be president 44 years ago. And, for that matter, neither could any woman.