That supreme showman of visual delights, Phineas Taylor Barnum, certainly had his spectators in mind—more than two thousand of them, and no one got in for free—when he planned the elaborate and highly publicized “Fairy Wedding” for Charles Sherwood Stratton (better known as General Tom Thumb) and his darling bride, Lavinia Warren Bump, on February 10, 1863, at Grace Church in New York City. Barnum had primed the audience with hyperbolic prose about the battle for Lavinia’s affection between Tom and George Washington Morrison Nutt—Commodore Nutt for short. Lavinia chose Tom, and Nutt was man enough to swallow his heartache and stand up as Tom’s best man.

The newspapers swooned over the diminutive spectacle with mock rapture. What a wedding! No detail left unattended to! What a vision of miniature perfection! Of course the bride was the focus of attention. With orange blossoms in her dark upswept hair, a flowing white gown of snowy satin and lace, white satin slippers, and tiny gloves to match, little Lavinia stood only thirty-two inches tall and weighed a mere twenty-nine pounds. How charming! How delightful!

more from The Believer here.

Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you probably have not heard of Antony Flew. Eighty-four years old and long retired, Flew lives with his wife in Reading, a medium-size town on the Thames an hour west of London. Over a long career he held appointments at a series of decent regional universities — Aberdeen, Keele, Reading — and earned a strong reputation writing on an unusual range of topics, from Hume to immortality to Darwin. His greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, “Theology and Falsification” has become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse thousand words, Flew argues that “God” is too vague a concept to be meaningful. For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved. Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — there was Antony Flew.

Flew’s fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

If you’re seeking some suggestions for celebrating Helvetica’s 50th birthday, might I recommend a trip to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which is presenting an exhibition devoted to the typeface? To mark the occasion, the MOMA acquired an original set of 36-point lead Helvetica letterforms. Of course, I don’t need to tell you to fly American Airlines to get there (their fuselage bears the grand imprint of Helvetica, as does and Lufthansa). Those looking to save money might consider renting a Toyota from National, or taking a Greyhound or Amtrak to New York (all of the aforementioned companies use Helvetica in their logos). Once in Manhattan, don’t forget to take a ride on the subway system, whose signage utilizes – you guessed it. And be sure to sip some VitaminWater, shop at American Apparel, and memorialize it all with your Olympus camera (powered with Energizer batteries), since all of these products boast Neue Haas Grotesk, as Helvetica was originally named.

If, by now, you are scratching your head, mumbling about how you thought Helvetica was supposed to be opening for The Killers, don’t feel bad. (And, perhaps more importantly, don’t stop reading this essay.) Helvetica’s lack of name-brand recognition is not your fault. Typography is considered an invisible art, and Helvetica’s ubiquity makes it even easier for it to disappear into the background, overshadowed by the meaning of the words it makes visible.

more from The Smart Set here.

Editorial from the Daily Times (of Pakistan):

What happened on Saturday was foreseen by many actors on the Pakistani political stage, especially Daily Times. We sounded many warnings to those who seemed bent upon confrontation, but these were either ignored or criticised. There was a division between those who sought a “revolutionary” change in favour of democracy and those who thought a “transition” would be less painful as well as more realistic, given the challenge of terrorism in the country. Daily Times was of the opinion that confrontation, if taken too far, would actually delay the date with democracy in January 2008 by when General Musharraf would have taken off his uniform and new general elections would have returned the peoples verdict. Indeed, we had argued against forcing a repetition of negative historical patterns in the country.

There were many who agreed with this “transitionist” view, but there was an opinion split across the board in the country which prevented realism from prevailing. The national economy, based on the “realism of opportunity”, silently supported transition, simply because it had done well during the period of political stability since 1999. The up and down movements of the stock exchange clearly signalled that any “revolutionary” fervour behind the desire to correct the “civil-military” relationship overnight in the country would be harmful.

More here.  [Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

Oren Harman in The New Republic:

The saga of man’s quest to crack the mystery of altruism is a weird, uplifting, and sometimes tragic affair. Its heroes include a bearded Russian anarchist prince who thought mankind needed to learn a lesson from the animals; a bushy-browed loner who asked to be laid out in the Brazilian rainforest so that his body could be buried and then eaten by beetles; and the enigmatic suicide in a dingy London apartment of an atheist-chemist turned religious evolutionarymathematician. The tale invites to the stage spitting tadpoles and “free-riding” cuckoo birds, naked blind mole rats, and some over-abused stepchildren of man. It spans the globe from the Siberian tundra to the South American tropics to the African plains, and gallops in time from Aristotle and Aquinas, through Hume and Adam Smith, to the “last man to know all there is to know,” and then all the way to economists, anthropologists, and brain imagers today.

In his slim book, the biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin skillfully presents the fabulous tale of modern biology’s wrestling with the problem of altruism. After Darwin found “altruism” in nature, a debate broke out between his “bulldog” Thomas Huxley and Pyotr Kropotkin about whether competition or cooperation is the norm in the living world. After all, cooperation was an anomaly in a Darwinian world that was all about struggle and survival. But since it was nonetheless observed in nature, people tried to explain how what seemed like acts of kindness could have arisen over evolutionary time. For a while the answer was that “friendly” groups will have a leg up on groups with selfish fellows, a solution that Darwin himself seemed to arrive at years before. But in the 1960s Bill Hamilton punched a great big hole in this feel-good “togetherness” story. Formalizing a quip made by J. B. S. Haldane, he explained “altruism” by looking at the world from an entirely surprising angle: benevolence could arise in nature precisely because selfish genes were running the show.

More here.

From Nature:

Cancer cells can be destroyed from within, by injecting them with nanotubes and then zapping the tubes with radio-frequency waves. Steven Curley at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and his colleagues have taken the first step in proving the technique by injecting carbon nanotubes into liver tumour cells in rabbits, then heating up the carbon with radio waves to kill the cancerous cells. Similar work has been done in cultured cells, but this is the first time that the technique has been used in tumours in live animals.

Researchers are keen to find a form of radiotherapy that is more selective than those currently used on in cancer treatment, as the high-energy radiation also kills off some innocent cells, causing hair loss and other more serious symptoms. One way to do this is to find a material that reacts to a frequency of radiation that leaves the rest of the body alone. If this material is embedded in cancerous cells, then only the cancerous cells would be targeted. Carbon nanotubes have been used before because, unusually, they can absorb near-infrared radiation, which penetrates human tissue without causing damage.

More here.

Michael Tomasky reviews The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books:

Difficult as it is to remember now, there was a time in the United States, as recently as fifteen or so years ago, when we were not engaged in constant political warfare. In those days Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in a war, would not have been visually equated with Saddam Hussein in a television ad, something the Republicans did to him in 2002. The release of a declaration by, for example, the National Academy of Sciences was for the most part acknowledged as legitimate, and not attacked as a product of so-called liberal bias as its 2005 report on global warming was.

We can regret, as it is customary to do, the loss of civility in political discourse (although such laments tend to assume a golden era that wasn’t quite as civil in reality as it is in the memories of those who mourn its passing). But the nakedness of the modern right’s drive for political power and of the Bush administration’s politicization of so many aspects of governance and civic life has, paradoxically, given us one thing to be grateful for. Liberals and Democrats now understand much more plainly the nature of the fight they’re in.

More here.

From the History Channel:

Imagine a big new house with free heating—and cooling. Mike Sykes’ Enertia Building System relies on thick wooden walls and a natural convection current to even out temperature extremes.

More here.  And hear an interview with Michael Sykes at CBC’s Quirks and Quarks here.

From Slate:

Niho Kozuru. Luna Rising, and Pistil.

Cast rubber.

More on this interesting Boston artist here and here.

Current show at Boston Sculptors Gallery.

Over at Public Reason, Robert Talisse asks:

I’m writing here to try to get some help on the meaning of a comment by Bernard Williams frequently cited approvingly in the value pluralist literature.

In his introduction to Berlin’s *Concepts and Categories*, Williams claims that “if there are many and competing values, then the greater the extent to which a society tends to be single-valued, the more genuine values it neglects or suppresses. More, to this extent, must mean better.”

Maybe I’m just being thick-headed about this, but I don’t see how “more must mean better”…

Tariq Ali in Counterpunch:

For anyone marinated in the history of Pakistan yesterday’s decision by the military to impose a State of Emergency will hardly comes as a surprise. Martial Law in this country has become an antibiotic: in order to obtain the same results one has to keep doubling the doses. What has taken place is a coup within a coup.

General Pervaiz Musharraf ruled the country with a civilian façade, but his power base was limited to the Army. And it was the Army Chief of Staff who declared the emergency, suspended the 1973 Constitution, took all non-government TV channels off the air, jammed the mobile phone networks, surrounded the Supreme Court with paramilitary units, dismissed the Chief Justice, arrested the President of the Bar association and the civil rights activists of the Human Right Commission of Pakistan, thus inaugurating yet another shabby period in the country history.

Why? They feared that a Supreme Court judgement due next week might make it impossible for Musharraf to contest the elections.

Rafal Kicinger and Tomasz Arciszewski in American Scientist:

To create dramatically new kinds of structures, engineers can mine many different sources of inspiration, but the natural world offers perhaps the richest lode. Indeed, engineers have probably drawn ideas from nature for millennia: A fallen log may have inspired the first bridge; a cave entrance, the first archway. And as scientists gradually began to understand the mechanisms governing various biological processes, engineers of all stripes were able to apply this knowledge to building complex devices. (The most famous example of such “biomimicry” may be Velcro fasteners, the idea for which came from the observation of sticky burdock seeds.)

We hope to heighten civil engineers’ appreciation for biology by suggesting that they go one step further, not only imitating natural shapes and forms but simulating nature’s evolutionary and developmental processes to arrive at their designs. Below we describe some computational methods that we have developed to design the support structures for buildings by imitating the action of genes and DNA.

More here.

Via NoUtopia.com:

Social Security

by Terrence Winch

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe.
Even in the safety zones, it’s not safe.
Even safe sex is not safe.
Even things you lock up in a safe
are not safe. Never deposit anything
in a safe-deposit box, because it
won’t be safe there. Nobody is safe
at home during baseball games anymore.

At night I go around in the dark
locking everything, returning
a few minutes later
to make sure I locked
everything. It’s not safe here.
It’s not safe and they know it.
People get hurt using safety pins.

It was not always this way.
Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle
never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger
only when Xerxes was around. Young women
were afraid of wingèd dragons, but felt
relaxed otherwise. Timotheus, however,
was terrified of storms until he played
one on the flute. After that, everyone
was more afraid of him than of the violent
west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.
Euclid, full of music himself, believed only
that there was safety in numbers.

From Acephalous:

My Teacher,

I appreciate you taking your inconvenience to instruct us but I really had some problems in your class and I would like to explain them to you now.  Every day I wanted to discuss with you about the way you grade my papers and the way you teach the class, but I could not because the things you say in class and your words disturb me so much I can not.  You make me completely uncomfortable with the little things you say in the class like how you talk about television or how you talk about when you are grading our papers and trying to be fair.  You do not seem to care about our grades only that they are up to your too high standards and I can not talk to you because you make me completely uncomfortable.  For example, you say you will talk to us about our grades but you really will not because of how uncomfortable you make me feel with your words and what you say.

More here.  [Thanks to Elatia Harris.]

There is a discussion of Charles Taylor’s new book A Secular Age at The Immanent Frame, which is a blog of the Social Science Research Council. Charles Taylor himself is posting there:

1. One great problem is that the term “secular” is a western term, and corresponds to a very old distinction within Christendom. Then it goes through a series of changes in order to surface in such neologisms as “secularization,” and “secularism.” But even so, some of the original meanings carry over. These terms are then applied unreflectingly to what are seen as analogous processes and ideas elsewhere, and the result can be great confusion. (Example: discussion of Indian “secularism”, whether or not the BJP is “secular”, etc.)

My way of dealing with this has been a prudent (or cowardly) approach of trying to examine the processes we call secularization primarily in the Western context. This however is not a clean and simple solution either, because a) the religious life of other cultures has impacted on the developments in the West (as Peter van der Veer has pointed out), and also one of the facets of contemporary religious life in the West is the borrowing of forms of devotion, meditation and worship from other parts of the world; and b) there has also been borrowing in the other direction, that is by non-Western societies from the West (hence the fact that certain arrangements of the Indian constitution are captured under the cover name “secularism”).

More here.

I believe it was George Berkeley who famously declared, “We are not assured of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our senses.”

Thanks a lot, Mr. Berkeley. Now can you please explain that to all these jerks who keep mistaking me for a golden-rumped lion tamarin?

People, I am a human being. I have hands and feet and feelings.

Yes, perhaps I occasionally enjoy the atmosphere of lowland tropical forests, especially semi-deciduous inland forests and humid coastal-plain forests. But that is simply because I have a penchant for bromeliads. Would you deny me that right—the right to munch on a little bromeliad using my specialized long-fingered hands?

more from McSweeney’s here.

As the biopic comes back into fashion — think Kinsey, think A Beautiful Mind — somebody might consider the life of Roman Polanski as perfect big-screen material. Its component elements are the stuff of box-office dreams. Holocaust survival, dodgy sex, motiveless murder, a liberal sprinkling of celebrity, plenty of photogenic locations — the Oscar-winning script is in the bag. Its star, as Christopher Sandford’s biography suggests, boasts unfathomable reserves of chutzpah, and his recent epiphany at the Venice Film Festival was a reminder of how much life the old dog still has left in him.

Polanski’s resilience was tested early, with the dispatch of his Jewish parents to Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Slipping out of Nazi-occupied Krakow, nine-year-old Roman fled to a village in the Tatra mountains, where he slept in a cowshed and lived off rat pie and boiled tree-bark. The postwar communist culture of relentless agitprop and uplift, in which Warsaw theatres staged plays with titles like The Workers’ Hearts Sing Out Like the Locomotive Whistle, made further demands on his survival skills. While still a student at film school in Lodz, he began plotting to ‘get the f*** out of Poland, grow a beard and become a writer’, but not before he had made his earliest screen masterpiece, Knife in the Water (1962).

more from The Spectator here.

The first time I saw the work of Lari Pittman was at the multiple-careers-making “Helter Skelter” show at MOCA in 1992, and I didn’t care for it. This was the era of his menacing sexualized owls, meticulously built-up psychedelic reliefs of dripping white candles, and circus-font repetitions of the number 69. In spite of their obvious craftsmanship and manifest fluency with a wide swath of the history of visual culture, the paintings’ sense of contained (if provocative) energies — not to mention the unironic deployment of such a conventional medium as acrylic and enamel on rectangular mahogany panels — made them seem out of step with such eruptive gestures as Paul McCarthy’s tree-fucking robot and Nancy Rubins’ roof-high mushroom-cloud tangle of trailers and hot-water heaters. Pittman’s work seemed a quirky vestige of the previous decade’s Reaganomic love affair with “New Image” painting, not the shape of things to come…. But Pittman’s 1996 Howard Fox–curated survey show at LACMA was a real epiphany.

more from the LA Weekly here.

One of my writing students handed in a story based around a mysterious lie, and so I found myself describing the Vallotton to my class. A man and a woman sit in a late 19th-century interior: yellow and pink striped wallpaper in the background, blocky furniture in shades of dark red in the foreground. The couple are entwined on a sofa, her rich scarlet curves bedded between the black legs of his trousers. She is whispering in his ear; he has his eyes closed. Clearly, the woman is the liar, a fact confirmed by the smiling complacency of the man’s expression and the way his left foot is cocked with the jauntiness of the unaware. All we might wonder is which lie he is being told. The old deceiver, “I love you”? Or does the swell of the woman’s dress invite that other favourite, “Of course the child is yours”?

more from The Guardian here.