We at 3QD want to cheer the engagement of our friend Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance and our friend and contributor Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics and offer them our congratulations! If you feel so inclined, you can congratulate them here and here. In their own words:
[Sean] How in the world is one expected to find such a person, in a world full of interesting but flawed characters? Well, there’s always the blogosphere. Two kindred spirits, tapping away at their matching MacBook Pros, could find each other across thousands of miles in a way that was heretofore impossible.
All of which, in a fumbling and hopefully-charming way, is to say that it’s happened. I’ve fallen hopelessly for the beautiful and talented Jennifer Ouellette, science writer extraordinaire and proprietess of Cocktail Party Physics. I first plugged her blog (completely innocently! honestly!) back in March, and we met in person at an APS meeting, of all places. Best conference ever.
And, various cross-country jaunts and countless emails later, we’re engaged to be married. If it’s clear that you’ve found the perfect person with whom you want nothing more than to spend the rest of your life, you might was well get the presents, right?
And Jennifer:
Some may wonder: why Sean Carroll, and not some other bloggy physicist or science type? I could provide a laundry list of reasons stretching into infinity, since one rarely needs an excuse to sing the praises of one’s beloved. But I’ll spare my readers. Let’s just say that the man has his very own bag of plush plagues, stuffed toys that represent the biblical ten plagues of Egypt. There’s even a tiny black cube of darkness. With eyes. I covet Sean’s bag of plagues, and figure the best way of sneakily appropriating them for my own is to enter into the bonds of matrimony. Community property and all that.
But the real reason is best illustrated by this: On Wednesday, after I’d finished my blogging duties at the Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco, we drove to his new home in Los Angeles via the “scenic route” along the coast. At sunset, we stopped briefly to refuel and to admire the brilliant orange, red and purple hues stretching across the horizon, and savor the peaceful sound of waves lapping against the shore. It was the perfect romantic setting to cap off a long and tiring several days. Sean is nothing if not romantic. So he put his arms around me and whispered, “Wouldn’t it be fascinating to take a Fourier transform of those waves?”
I will never listen to ocean waves or view a beautiful sunset in quite the same way again.
Africa is a mess and it’s not going to get better any time soon. That’s the awful truth that’s so hard to face — or to state publicly — for those of us who have had a long, intimate relationship with the continent. Mine has lasted for almost forty-five years. But from the very start, my experiences in Africa began conflicting with my hopes, indicating trouble afoot, foretelling that our utopian dreams were going to lead to crushing disappointments. Of course, we should have known what the entire twentieth century taught: that all utopian dreams fail, not least those wrapped in progressive rhetoric. Still, the reality in so much of Africa has been infinitely more appalling than anything we might have feared.
more from The Walrus here.
With some exaggeration, one could say that in October 1956 the peoples of Europe and North America, together with their legitimate governments, decided to put an end, once and for all, to the age of revolutionary change. And they were right to do so. To avoid another world war, the existing orders had to integrate, in some way or another, the social and political dissatisfaction of the age; this became the supreme commandment of the day. Expressing deep regrets, with bleeding heart and being fully conscious of their responsibility, they opted not to support the headless and hundred-and-fifty-years overdue Hungarian revolution either by diplomatic means or by sending volunteers or weapons. This had nothing to do with the Suez crisis. Only the dimmer types in Hungary can console themselves by believing that it was due to some business about ships that the Americans and the European democracies couldn’t pay attention to them. Besides the danger of another world war, they had other good reasons not to do anything. Had they decided to support the Hungarian revolution, it would have soon turned out that the capitalist – socialist dichotomy had remained, irrespective of the ideological hysterics of Russian imperialism (also seriously belated). The Hungarian revolution – contrary to popular opinion, and despite all of its anti-communist excesses – was not an anti-socialist revolution, and in its first phase not even an anti-communist one. It was clearly an anti-Stalinist revolution and clearly a plebeian one, it wanted independence and it wanted no part of the Russian empire; it was a democratic revolution that had no tolerance for foreign rule, for autocracy or for the arbitrary rule of collectives. It should not for a moment be forgotten that in that memorable year, the working class was still intact, along with the Christian democratic and social democratic traditions, and so was the agrarian proletariat, with its own, extremely vital social movements.
more from Eurozine here.
In many countries, the return of the nation-state has caused an introverted mood; the theme of Europe has been devalued, the national agenda has taken priority. In our talk-shows, grandfathers and grandchildren hug each other, swelling with feel-good patriotism. The security of undamaged national roots should make a population that’s been pampered by the welfare state “compatible with the future” in the competive global environment. This rhetoric fits with the current state of global politics which have lost all their inhibitions in social darwinistic terms.
Now we Europe alarmists are being instructed that an intensification of European institutions is neither necessary nor possible. It is being claimed that the drive behind European unification has vanished and for good reason, since the objectives of peace between the European peoples and the creation of a common market have been met. In addition, the ongoing rivalries between nation states are said to demonstrate the impossibility of a political collectivisation that extends beyond national boundaries. I hold both objections for wrong. Allow me to name the most urgent and potentially risky problems that will remain unsolved if we stay stuck along the way to a Europe that is politically capable of action and bound in a democratic constitutional framework.
more from Sign and Sight here (via TPM).
Four or five miles along the asphalt road that runs east from Kaala, a small town in central Angola, a Chinese construction company has carved an unexpected right turn, a broad dirt path that runs over a rise through scrubby forest. The path, which has no marking, winds past a basketball court — recreation for the work force — and then empties out into a vast plaza of meticulously smoothed earth. Dump trucks ferry loads of dirt back and forth. At the far end of the plaza, obscured by tree trunks that have been uprooted and laid carefully on their sides, are train tracks. The whole scene, invisible from the road, conjures the stupendous designs of the evil genius in a Bond film.
The weed-covered tracks are the remnants of a railway built by British engineers a century ago to transport precious minerals from the heart of the continent to the port of Lobito, more than a thousand miles away. The Angolan government is paying a consortium of Chinese companies $1.9 billion to completely reconstruct the tracks, the bridges, the stations, the equipment, all shattered by a quarter-century of warfare and neglect. The construction company working near Kaala had prepared the ground to build a factory that would turn out tens of thousands of iron railroad ties. An Angolan security guard who came out to cross-examine us said that the work force was still waiting for material to arrive. He asked us politely to leave. We complied, and as we drove back to the provincial capital, Huambo, we turned down another dirt road and found another Chinese company building an agricultural high school.
more from the NY Times Magazine here.
The defining images of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968 were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and published anonymously, to protect the photographer and his relatives. Ironic, with the benefit of hindsight, since a glance at the pictures is enough to identify the perpetrator: Josef Koudelka, one of the least anonymous, most recognisable photographers in the medium’s history. These pictures – of the citizens of Prague, swarming the streets as tanks rumble towards them – fixed the events of August 1968 in the mind as firmly as the one of the student in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square would do two decades later. The difference is that, where the Tiananmen picture was detached, taken from a distance, Koudelka’s were snatched by someone caught up in the swirl and danger of events, as much a participant as his subjects.
more from The Guardian here.
From despardes.com:
Cricketing legend and Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan along with a large number of party’s workers left Lahore in a motorcade for Shahiwal for the opening salvo of a movement against Musharraf’s government.
According to media reports, the Shahiwal administration has refused permission to him for holding a public meeting or taking out a procession in the open ground fearing law and order situation. They have advised him to address the gathering anywhere within the boundary walls or at any of the marriage halls, but without the use of loudspeakers.
Prior to departing for Shahiwal, Imran Khan reportedly told media, “Our movement is peaceful, therefore, the government should not put hurdles in its way, otherwise, all the responsibility for the situation will lie on the administration.” Khan also said the other opposition parties should also resign from the assemblies, following MMA. Friday evening, an Indian TV channel aired a program in which Imran Khan discussed cricket, politics and personal life with the Indian audience.
More here.
From Guardian:
Paul Muldoon’s Oxford lectures, The End of the Poem, offer a trenchant and clever analysis of the power of poetry, even finding space to salute Christ as a ‘great punster’, says Peter Conrad. Paul Muldoon’s premonitory title does not mean what it seems to say: these lectures, delivered during his time as professor of poetry at Oxford, are far from being an obsequy for the art. Poems, if they are good, need never end. A poem, as Auden said when explaining how one was written, cannot be finished: it is simply abandoned by a poet who can add no more to it. The reader then takes over and, with luck, discovers another kind of endlessness: reading leads to rereading, as the words are coaxed into releasing subtler, richer meanings, dilating into ever ampler contexts.
Unlike many of his predecessors, Muldoon chooses not to generalise about poetry. Instead, he explicates individual poems, one per lecture. The procedure demands close attention, but the results are revelatory. Reading here is a collaborative recreation and, at their best, Muldoon’s interpretations – sometimes whimsically tenuous, often breathtaking in their intellectual boldness – are like improvised, free associating poems.
More here.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
When people talk about the explosion of art in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, they usually mean the Ramones and Television and punk rock, or Jean-Michel Basquiat and the downtown arts scene. But a lively literary movement was taking place, though it has received considerably less attention. Around the time Patti Smith was recording her debut album, “Horses,” the cultural provocateur Kathy Acker was mailing acquaintances mimeographed stories that juxtaposed violence and vulnerability under the name “the Black Tarantula.” The writer and performer Constance DeJong was creating multimedia works with Philip Glass. At the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the monologuist Eric Bogosian was giving his first solo performance. Taken together, according to Brandon Stosuy, the editor of “Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992,” this activity represents the birth of an underground literary movement that was just as vibrant as the musical revolution taking place. “Though much of it is out of print and difficult to locate, Downtown writing has never been more relevant,” Stosuy claims.
more from the NY Times Book Review here.
Some people prefer to contemplate the maps of London rather than navigate their way around its physical streets. Branwell Brontë, immured in the parsonage of Haworth, closely studied any map of London he could find. He familiarised himself with every street, and every junction, so that he could discourse freely and effectively with any Londoner passing through his neighbourhood. It was as if he had himself become a resident of the city. He never set foot in the cap ital during his short life; but he felt that he knew it intimately. It was an illusion, of course, but all maps are illusions.
The history of London may be said to unfold, map by map, in symbolic fashion. The map is a symbol, not a record or a description. It bears as much relation to the actual shape and nature of London as the sculptures of Canova or Rodin bear to the human form. The map is an idealisation, a beautiful illusion of symmetry and grace. It gives form and order to the formless and disordered appearance of the capital. In the British Library’s forthcoming exhibition “London: a life in maps”, there is a gallery of shapes and perspectives, decorous and intriguing in turn, all of them creating a wholly different London.
more from The New Statesman here.
Memorials to death by violence surround Khoury. Hariri’s shrine is a short walk from the main entrance of the an-Nahar offices, up through Martyrs’ Square, where a statue commemorates the Syrian and Lebanese anti-Ottoman radicals betrayed by the French and hanged by Jemal Pasha in 1916. On the front of the an-Nahar building itself is a banner-size portrait of Gebran Tueni, editor and grandson of the founder, who was killed by a car-bomb last December. Earlier in the year, after the huge ‘independence’ demonstrations aimed at Damascus, the same thing had happened to Samir Kassir, a colleague and great friend of Khoury’s. Kassir, part Palestinian, part Syrian, wholly Lebanese, was a founding member of the DLM. Like Tueni, though well to his left, Kassir was a vociferous critic of Syria. Khoury remembers trying to get through the police cordon around Kassir’s car in Ashrafiyyeh: he could see the slumped head and shoulders and thought his friend was still alive. ‘But the bomb had been placed directly under the driver’s seat,’ Khoury said, ‘and the head and shoulders were all that was left.’ Kassir’s glass-partitioned office, separated by a few yards of open plan from Khoury’s, is more or less as it was on 2 June 2005. ‘We just closed it and left it,’ he explained. ‘So Samir is still with us.’ On Kassir’s desk a few old copies of Le Monde are turning yellow. A mousepad gathers dust.
more from the LRB here.
In the post-war books that Firbank wrote and set abroad, things are rather different. In them the death of England, the imaginative liberation from English custom, indifference, cliché and hypocrisy, is engineered and celebrated in a very personal and defiant fashion. His own gay presence, as observer and admirer of young men, is unignorably strong. One of the concomitants of this change of setting and view is a change in manner, a more conventional handling of narrative, a clearing of texture. He becomes much less difficult. The books are still extraordinary: The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), a hauntingly funny fantasy of court intrigue in which the jilting and heartbreak of a young woman culminates in a harrowing tragic ending; Sorrow in Sunlight, the following year, Firbank’s shortest, quickest and most brilliant novel, set on an imaginary Caribbean island, and his first to be published in the United States, just as it was the first he was actually paid for; and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, his most involved approach to a self-portrait, rejected by his enterprising new American publishers “on moral grounds”, and published, by Grant Richards again, six weeks after Firbank’s death. These books are all masterpieces, and in any full celebration of Firbank they would be the crown. But I have chosen to concentrate on that earlier mysterious period when Arthur Firbank emerged as Ronald Firbank, in his unprecedented novelty and complexity.
more from the TLS here.
Douglas K. Smith in Slate:
Private-sector companies have ready access to a gargantuan capital market of tens of trillions of dollars globally. Nonprofit organizations, by contrast, are crippled by capital-raising efforts that are minuscule, inefficient, and badly organized. As a result, nonprofits that have developed solutions for critical and growing challenges—in fields like education, health care, housing, economic development, and environmental sustainability—often struggle to grow.
This is a problem with a solution that is entirely within the power of our legislatures. Like the private sector, nonprofits need investors who take risks in pursuit of financial return.
More here.
From Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:
ISRAEL’S ASSAULT on Lebanon that began in July was not so much a war as a conflagration. Round-the-clock bombing and shelling by the Israeli air force continued day after day, causing hundreds of civilian deaths, and inflicting trauma and misery on hundreds of thousands more. Targets of the precision bombing included a U.N. observer post, Red Cross ambulances, roads, bridges, power systems and communication networks. Residents of neighborhoods under siege were bombed as they tried to flee. Others were buried under rubble when whole buildings collapsed and rescuers were unable to reach them. Trucks carrying medical and relief supplies were hit, and many of the sick and wounded died as hospitals ran out of generator fuel, antibiotics, even water and food.
Within days Israel turned Lebanon from a modern country that was still rebuilding from past Israeli invasions, into a place of desolation and death. And it did so with wholehearted help from the United States. When the Israelis began running out of munitions, the Bush administration rushed them a shipment of 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs designed to penetrate deep into the ground. The missiles would be dropped on their targets from American-made warplanes.
The European Union, the French government, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned Israel’s military operations as an “excessive use of force” that “cannot be justified.” Amnesty International accused Israel of “war crimes.” The United States alone gave a green light to Israel to continue its attacks. “I’m not sure at this juncture we’re going to step in and put up a stop sign,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said, as the number of dead rose and Lebanese corpses lay unburied in the ruins of their homes.
More here.
From The New York Times:
COLLECTED POEMS, 1947-1997 By Allen Ginsberg.
Gay, in the lotus position, with a beard, wreathed in a cloud of marijuana smoke and renowned as the author of a “dirty” poem whose first public reading in a West Coast gallery was said to have turned the 1950s into the ’60s in a single night, Allen Ginsberg embodied, as a figure, some great cold war climax of human disinhibition. Ginsberg, the hang-loose anti-Ike. Ginsberg, the Organization Man unzipped. The vulnerable obverse of the Bomb. He had the belly of a Buddha, the facial hair of a Walt Whitman and — except for the ever-present black glasses that hinted at a conformist path not taken — he was easier to imagine naked than any Homo sapiens since Adam.
But it’s difficult to memorialize such a personage. When Ginsberg died in 1997, he was a 70-year-old beatnik, which made him a cultural antiquity. Now, however, almost a decade later (and exactly 50 years after the publication of “Howl”), he still seems too familiar for immortality. Wasn’t he, just a few days before yesterday, hanging out backstage with rock stars? Wasn’t he just marching against the Persian Gulf War? Come out, Allen Ginsberg — you’re around here somewhere. If Dylan is, then you must be.
More here.
Friday, November 17, 2006
From Time:
So here’s how we chose the albums for the All-TIME 100. We researched and listened and agonized until we had a list of the greatest and most influential records ever – and then everyone complained because there was no Pink Floyd on it. And that’s exactly how it should be. We hope you’ll treat the All-TIME 100 as a great musical parlor game. Read and listen to the arguments for the selections, then tell us what we missed or got wrong. Or even possibly what we got right.
1960s
| Album | | Artist | | Label/Year Released |
More here.
From MSNBC News:
A first-ever museum display, “Against Nature?,” which opened last month at the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum in Norway, presents 51 species of animals exhibiting homosexuality. Homosexuality has been observed in more than 1,500 species, and the phenomenon has been well described for 500 of them,” said Petter Bockman, project coordinator of the exhibition. “I think to some extent people don’t think it’s important because we went through all this time period in sociobiology where everything had to be tied to reproduction and reproductive success,” said Linda Wolfe, who heads the Department of Anthropology at East Carolina University. “If it doesn’t have [something to do] with reproduction it’s not important.”
However, species continuation may not always be the ultimate goal, as many animals, including humans, engage in sexual activities more than is necessary for reproduction. “You can make up all kinds of stories: Oh it’s for dominance, it’s for this, it’s for that, but when it comes down to the bottom I think it’s just for sexual pleasure,” Wolfe told LiveScience. Conversely, some argue that homosexual sex could have a bigger natural cause than just pure pleasure: namely evolutionary benefits.
More here.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Michael Bywater in The New Statesman:
Andrew Robinson’s book is the intellectual biography of Thomas Young, “the anonymous polymath who proved Newton wrong, explained how we see, cured the sick, and deciphered the Rosetta Stone” – to quote the delightful, if hyperbolic, subtitle. But before we get on to its hyperbole, our hackles are already up, bristling at the word “polymath”.
We don’t like polymaths any more. Perhaps it’s because even being a monomath is too difficult now; even specialists specialise only in a small subset of their specialty, and learning is an either/or business. The wave/particle duality of light or the practice of medicine, but not both. Making a serious breakthrough in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs or serving with distinction on the Board of Longitude, but not both. That’s the modern way.
Thomas Young, who lived from 1773 to 1829, felt no such constraints. While he may not have been the last “man who knew everything”, he made significant progress in the fields of Egyptology, optics and the physics of light, and serious contributions to many other disciplines.
More here.
In Red Herring:
At first glance, the MySpace page of Randy Halprin, 29, of Livingston, Texas, is just a typical profile on the social networking site. It features a photograph of a smiling young man and dozens of blinking graphics of peace signs, goofy-looking aliens, pop-culture images and pro-vegetarian icons. The profile has 170 friends listed as of November 15, 2006. “Look at all the beauty still left around you and be happy, – Anne Frank” quotes his profile title.
It isn’t apparent until reading the blog entries on his profile that Mr. Halprin is a convicted murderer, awaiting his execution on death row.
Mr. Halprin is one of the “Texas 7,” a group of criminals that escaped from prison on Dec. 13, 2000. Of the escaped convicts, he was the youngest of the group at 23, and also serving the shortest sentence of 30 years for injury to a child. After escaping from prison, the seven were running low on funds, so they started on a spree of robberies, killing a police officer and injuring others. This landed all seven convicts on death row.
Since death row immates do not have Internet access, the profiles on MySpace are created and hosted for them by friends and family. Some profiles feature blog posts, which are transcribed from letters sent from jail.
(Kevin Poulsen comments in Wired.)
