From The News:
KARACHI: In an incident that shocked art lovers and a legion of admirers, the country’s most celebrated artist Ismail Gulgee, along with his wife and maid, was found strangled to death at his home in Clifton on Wednesday. The bodies were three days old and the artist’s driver and other servants were missing. A case was lodged at the Boating Basin police station on the complaint of the son of the deceased, the well-known sculptor Amin Gulgee.
More here.
Steve Mollman at CNN:
Imagine taking the industrial design smarts behind the iPod and applying it to the far more basic technology needs of the extremely poor. In the past, few top designers would have bothered. But that’s changing.
At MIT, Stanford, and other universities, young design and engineering talents are eagerly enrolling in courses that teach them how to meet the technology needs of the developing world. Stanford offers a course called “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability.” One of the teachers, David Kelley, is the founder of IDEO, the industrial design firm behind such tech classics as the Palm V PDA and the first production mouse for the Lisa and Macintosh computers from Apple.
Amy B. Smith, an inventor who lectures at MIT, said her course on design for the developing world gets about a hundred applicants, but she can only take 30.
Smith was a lead organizer behind the International Development Design Summit (www.iddsummit.org), held at MIT this summer and planned again for next year. Mechanics, doctors and farmers from around the developing world teamed up with top design talents to come up with “pro-poor” technologies that are inexpensive and effective. One, an off-grid refrigeration unit, uses PVC piping, tiny water drips, and an evaporation-based cooling method to store perishable food in rural areas.
More here.
Mustafa Barghouthi, member of the Palestinian parliament and former candidate for president of the Palestinian Authority, and a founder of the Palestinian National Initiative, in The Baltimore Sun (reprinted in electronic intifada):
As one who for decades has supported a two-state solution and the nonviolent struggle for Palestinian rights, I view the recent conference in Annapolis with a great deal of skepticism — and a glimmer of hope.
Seven years with no negotiations — and increasing numbers of Israeli settlers, an economic blockade in Gaza and an intricate network of roadblocks and checkpoints stifling movement in the West Bank — have led us to despair and distrust. Any commitment must be made not only to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008 but also to end Israel’s occupation.
The Palestinians must also heal their internal divisions. This must include institutional reform to root out corruption and nepotism. The first step in that process is democratic elections at all levels of government.
We must rid ourselves of the false dichotomy between Fatah and Hamas. These are not the only options. My movement, the five-year-old Palestinian National Initiative, offers an alternative emphasizing democratic elections, transparent government and institution-building. Our goal is to democratize and engage the Palestinian national movement in a unified strategy to confront Israel’s ongoing occupation and seizure of our land and resources. We strive to achieve our national rights in our homeland and to establish social justice to uphold the rights of the underprivileged and marginalized, including women, children and people with disabilities.
[H/t: Saifedean Ammous]
My two favorite books of 2007 could not have less in common on the surface. Yet “Matters of Honor” (Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95), a novel by Louis Begley, and “Ambition and Survival” (Copper Canyon, 249 pages, $18), a prose collection by Christian Wiman, converge in ways that suggest how little the outward tokens of “identity” have to do with a writer’s true self. Mr. Begley, a Jewish Holocaust survivor in his 70s, and Mr. Wiman, born to a Southern Baptist family in Texas in the 1960s, are united by their devotion to literary art, and their ironic awareness of the cost that devotion exacts. Perhaps it is because these two books are so morally and intellectually strenuous — though never recondite, and always absorbing — that they were greeted with resistance by many reviewers.
more from the NY Sun here.
Alfred North Whitehead famously described the European philosophical tradition as “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Whether or not this is fair to the thinkers that followed Plato, it is a gross injustice to those that preceded him. Pre-eminent among these was Parmenides. Elizabeth Anscombe’s riposte that Plato might be regarded as “Parmenides’s footnote” is not as perverse as it seems. While Plato’s dialogues are among the supreme philosophical works of the western tradition, it was Parmenides who established the implicit framework of their debates.
Plato acknowledged that Parmenides had “magnificent depths.” But there is more to Parmenides than this: in his thought, human consciousness had a crucial encounter with itself. This was, I believe, a decisive moment in the long awakening of the human species to its own nature. From this self-encounter resulted the cognitive self-criticism, the profound critical sense that gave birth to the unfolding intellectual dramas of metaphysics and science that have in the last century or so approached an impasse.
more from Prospect Magazine here.
First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are likely to draw a puzzled ‘Claude who?’ even from otherwise predatory culture vultures. In my own case – it’s true – certain vile French diphthongs may be part of the problem: the phonetic distinctions between Cahun, Caen, Caïn, Cannes, Cohn, canne, cane, cagne, camp, cône and con remain, sadly, a perpetual trial. Yet it’s also undeniable: though one of the most extraordinary personalities associated with both the French Surrealist movement and the Resistance, Cahun is still scarcely known to an English-speaking public.
Which isn’t to say she has languished in utter obscurity. In the baleful little world of academic ‘gender studies’ (strap-ons and piercings strongly advised) the cross-dressing Cahun has been a cult heroine for a decade or two. Nor is it difficult to see why. She was an inventive and fearless early practitioner of set-up photography: the self-conscious ‘staging’ of images in order to produce a theatrical or conceptual effect. And as with many other set-up specialists, Cahun was her own favourite subject. Though it’s hard to say if she knew the work of either, two of her most notorious precursors in this regard were the Countess of Castiglione (1837-99), a wealthy and eccentric Franco-Italian narcissist who hired a studio photographer to take scores of secret pictures of her in bizarre poses and costumes, and the Stieglitz associate F. ‘Fred’ Holland Day, whose semi-nude impersonation of Jesus Christ on the Cross – at once gauzy, grisly and homoerotic – provoked a scandal when he exhibited the photographs in 1898.
more from the LRB here.
Caleb Crain in The New Yorker:
In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.
You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”
More here.
From Scientific American:
Chemicals in a Martian meteorite that were once held up as possible evidence of life on ancient Mars were more likely the product of heat, water and chemistry, according to a new study. Researchers from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Oslo in Norway reached that conclusion after comparing the four-pound (two-kilogram) extraterrestrial rock, ALH84001, with samples of earthly volcanic material—and discovering a matching pattern of minerals consistent with a chemical process that yields carbon compounds after rapid heating and cooling.
Although the study does not support the existence of life on Mars, researchers say it shows that some of the chemical precursors of life—at least as we know it—were kicking around on the Red Planet some 4.5 billion years ago.
More here.
Sara Rimer in the New York Times:
Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.
“Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.
Steve Boigon, 62, a florist from San Diego, wrote, “I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes.”
Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits.
More here.
Carlotta Gall in the New York Times:
Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies, apparently trying to avoid acknowledging an elaborate secret detention system, have quietly set free nearly 100 men suspected of links to terrorism, few of whom were charged, human rights groups and lawyers here say.
Those released, they say, are some of the nearly 500 Pakistanis presumed to have disappeared into the hands of the Pakistani intelligence agencies cooperating with Washington’s fight against terrorism since 2001.
No official reason has been given for the releases, but as pressure has mounted to bring the cases into the courts, the government has decided to jettison some suspects and spare itself the embarrassment of having to reveal that people have been held on flimsy evidence in the secret system, its opponents say.
More here.
More here.
David Byrne in Wired:
Full disclosure: I used to own a record label. That label, Luaka Bop, still exists, though I’m no longer involved in running it. My last record came out through Nonesuch, a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group empire. I have also released music through indie labels like Thrill Jockey, and I have pressed up CDs and sold them on tour. I tour every few years, and I don’t see it as simply a loss leader for CD sales. So I have seen this business from both sides. I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I bet I’m not the only one who can say that.
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.
More here.
Since it appears to be poetry day and since Azra has posted a review of Cartledge’s Thermopylae, I’ve decided to mesh the two. Translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard:
Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they’re rich, and when they’re poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping as much as they can;
always speaking the truth,
yet without hating those who lie.
And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that Ephialtis will turn up in the end,
that the Medes will break through after all.
Jasper Griffin in The New York Review of Books:
The early history of Europe is a history of constant invasions from the East. The peoples which think of themselves nowadays as quintessentially European — the French, the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons — all came into what we now call Europe, originally, from what we now call Asia. It was only later that invasion and conquest began to move in the opposite direction, and that Europe, an increasingly precocious and disrespectful heir to the ancient civilizations of Asia, began to march eastward, and to conquer the progenitors of its own upstart culture.
The rise of Greece, in this perspective, was made easier — perhaps was made possible altogether — by a rare intermission in the succession of great powers which usually dominated what we now call the Middle East. The polis, the city-state, the typical form of Greek society in the classical period, grew up in the position, a rare and privileged one, of freedom from the immediate shadow of an overwhelming power. Such empires, like that of Assyria, were based somewhere further east than Hellas. A power of that kind would inevitably, sooner or later, invade and conquer the Greek cities of Asia Minor, where philosophy and the scientific attitude were beginning to take their first tentative root. As it was, the eastern Greeks encountered, in the sixth century BCE, only the rather well disposed and Hellenophile kingdom of Lydia, based in what is now northwestern Turkey, and surprisingly open to Greek art and to Greek cultural influences.
More here.
Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:
“Gravity,” goes the slogan on posters and bumper stickers. “It isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law.” And what a law. Unlike, say, traffic or drug laws, you don’t have a choice about obeying gravity or any of the other laws of physics. Jump and you will come back down. Faith or good intentions have nothing to do with it. Existence didn’t have to be that way, as Einstein reminded us when he said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Against all the odds, we can send e-mail to Sri Lanka, thread spacecraft through the rings of Saturn, take a pill to chase the inky tendrils of depression, bake a turkey or a soufflé and bury a jump shot from the corner.
Yes, it’s a lawful universe. But what kind of laws are these, anyway, that might be inscribed on a T-shirt but apparently not on any stone tablet that we have ever been able to find? Are they merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don’t know and that most scientists don’t seem to know or care where they come from? Apparently it does matter, judging from the reaction to a recent article by Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and author of popular science books, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.
More here.
On a rainy October night in Washington, D.C., the friends and family of Jeremy Blake gathered for a private memorial service at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Blake, an art-world star acclaimed for his lush and moody “moving paintings,” shape-shifting innovations mixing abstract painting and digital film, had ended his life on the night of July 17, walking into the Atlantic Ocean off Rockaway Beach, Queens, never to return.
“I am going to join the lovely Theresa,” Blake, 35, had written on the back of a business card, which he left on the beach, along with his clothes. Police helicopters searched for him for days on the chance he might still be alive. Friends prayed that he was, talking of how his passport was missing, he had bought a ticket to Germany. Then on July 22, a fisherman found his body floating 4.5 miles off Sea Girt, New Jersey.
“The lovely Theresa” was Theresa Duncan, a writer, filmmaker, computer-game creator, and Blake’s girlfriend of 12 years. He had found her lifeless body on July 10, in the rectory of St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village, where the couple had been renting an apartment. There was a bowl full of Benadryl pills, a bottle of Tylenol PM, and a champagne glass on the nightstand. There was a note saying, “I love all of you.” Duncan was 40. The last post on her blog, “The Wit of the Staircase,” was a quote from author Reynolds Price about the human need for storytelling and the impossibility of surviving in silence.
more from Vanity Fair here.
There are people who think of J. M. Coetzee as a cold writer, and he might agree, or pretend to agree. “If he were a warmer person he would no doubt find it all easier: life, love, poetry,” he writes of himself in his memoir “Youth.” “But warmth is not in his nature.” The protagonist of Coetzee’s new novel, “Diary of a Bad Year” (Viking; $24.95), is, like his creator, an aging South African novelist resident in Australia, who muses at one moment that his father surely thought him a selfish child “who has turned into a cold man.” His art, he laments, is “not great-souled.” It lacks “generosity, fails to celebrate life, lacks love.”
Yet this is the cold air just beyond the reach of a fire. Coetzee’s chaste, exact, ashen prose may look like the very embers of restraint, but it is drawn, again and again, to passionate extremity: an uneducated gardener forced to live like an animal off the South African earth (“Life & Times of Michael K”); a white woman dying of cancer while a black township burns, and writing, in her last days, a letter of brutal truths to her daughter (“Age of Iron”); a white woman raped on her farm by a gang of black men, and impregnated (“Disgrace”); a recent amputee, the victim of a road accident that mangled a leg, helpless in his Adelaide apartment, and awkwardly in love with his Croatian nurse (“Slow Man”). Coetzee seems compelled to test his celebrated restraint against subjects and ideas whose extremity challenges novelistic representation.
more from The New Yorker here.
Torture isn’t an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.
In one instance after another, democracies developed new torture techniques, refined them, and then exported them to more authoritarian regimes. Americans didn’t just develop electric power; they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations from Arkansas to Seattle. Magneto torture, a technique favored by the Nazis involving a portable generator, was actually developed and spread by the French. Waterboarding and forced standing owe their wide use to the Americans and British.
more from Boston Globe Ideas here.
PD Smith in Kafka’s mouse:
One of the most significant cultural events of 2007 was undoubtedly The Simpsons Movie. The contribution of Homer Jay Simpson (aka the “Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”) to science is often sadly overlooked. Physicist Stephen Hawking is a great fan of the TV show and has appeared twice. He knows a good scientific idea when he sees one and Homer’s theory that the universe is shaped like a donut made an immediate impression: “intriguing….I may have to steal it.” This as well as many other weird and wonderful scientific moments in the series – such as what processes could produce Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish and do toilets in the northern and southern hemispheres really swirl in opposite directions (as Lisa claims in “Bart vs Australia”) – are explained in What’s Science Ever Done for Us? What The Simpsons can teach us about Physics, Robots, Life, and the Universe, by Paul Halpern. A delightful book; as Montgomery Burns might say: “Exx-cellent!”
More here.
A strange new family of algorithms probes the boundary between easy and hard problems.
Brian Hayes in American Scientist:
Why are some computational problems so hard and others easy? This may sound like a childish, whining question, to be dismissed with a shrug or a wisecrack, but if you dress it up in the fancy jargon of computational complexity theory, it becomes quite a serious and grownup question: Is P equal to NP? An answer—accompanied by a proof—will get you a million bucks from the Clay Mathematics Institute.
I’ll return in a moment to P and NP, but first an example, which offers a glimpse of the mystery lurking beneath the surface of hard and easy problems. Consider a mathematical graph, a collection of vertices (represented by dots) and edges (lines that connect the dots). Here’s a nicely symmetrical example:
Is it possible to construct a path that traverses each edge exactly once and returns to the starting point? For any graph with a finite number of edges, we could answer such a question by brute force: Simply list all possible paths and check to see whether any of them meet the stated conditions. But there’s a better way. In 1736 Leonhard Euler proved that the desired path (now called an Eulerian circuit) exists if and only if every vertex is the end point of an even number of edges. We can check whether a graph has this property without any laborious enumeration of pathways.
Now take the same graph and ask a slightly different question: Is there a circuit that passes through every vertex exactly once? This problem was posed in 1858 by William Rowan Hamilton, and the path is called a Hamiltonian circuit. Again we can get the answer by brute force. But in this case there is no trick like Euler’s; no one knows any method that gives the correct answer for all graphs and does so substantially quicker than exhaustive search. Superficially, the two problems look almost identical, but Hamilton’s version is far harder. Why? Is it because no shortcut solution exists, or have we not yet been clever enough to find one?
More here.
