Asia is the most masculine continent, and Europe the most feminine, in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Number of men per 100 women [In Society]

Europe: 92.7

North America (US & Canada): 96.9

Latin America: 97.5

Oceania: 99.5

Africa: 99.8

Asia: 103.9

China: 105.6

India: 102.4

Pakistan: 106.6

Bangladesh: 104.5

Taiwan: 103.8

Indonesia: 100.6

Number of boys per 100 girls [At birth]

China: 117 (Jiangxi & Guangdong: 138)

India: 111 (Punjab: 126 Haryana: 125)

Taiwan: 110

Indonesia*: 106

South Korea: 108

Azerbaijan: 115

Georgia: 118

Armenia: 120

* Infants under one year

In news@nature:

Communities of kissing cousins may be at a disadvantage in the plant world, according to a study in this week’s issue of Science.

It is well known that having a number of different plant species in a field can help to promote insect diversity, boost the plants’ productivity and improve the overall ecological health of an area. Now it seems that genetic diversity within a species has similar effects. The findings could lead to better habitat restoration and agriculture.

Gregory Crutsinger, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, studied fields of goldenrod — a weedy perennial that can grow taller than 3 metres and produces clusters of yellow flowers. He first gathered a selection of genetically distinct plants, picking them from patches at least 100 metres apart. He then planted 63 plots of goldenrods in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee. In some plots he planted only one genetic type, in others he grew a range of types.

And Via Lindsay Beyerstein, an excerpt from Mark Haddon’s new novel A Spot of Bother, in the Guardian.

It began when George was trying on a black suit in Allders the week before Bob Green’s funeral. It was not the prospect of the funeral that had unsettled him. Nor Bob dying. To be honest he had always found Bob’s locker-room bonhomie slightly tiring and he was secretly relieved that they would not be playing squash again. Moreover, the manner in which Bob had died (a heart attack while watching the Boat Race on television) was oddly reassuring. Susan had come back from her sister’s and found him lying on his back in the centre of the room with one hand over his eyes, looking so peaceful she thought initially that he was taking a nap.

It would have been painful, obviously. But one could cope with pain. And the endorphins would have kicked in soon enough, followed by that sensation of one’s life rushing before one’s eyes which George himself had experienced several years ago when he had fallen from a stepladder, broken his elbow on the rockery and passed out, a sensation which he remembered as being not unpleasant (a view from the Tamar Bridge in Plymouth had figured prominently for some reason). The same probably went for that tunnel of bright light as the eyes died, given the number of people who heard the angels calling them home and woke to find a junior doctor standing over them with a defibrillator.

Via Delong, Matthew Yglesias has an interesting take on France’s diplomatic strategy in the recent Israel-Lebanon war.

In essence, through two consecutive bait-and-switches — first over the wording of a UN resolution, and second over the deployment of French troops to Lebanon — France managed to get both parties to agree to a return to the status quo ante, which is better for both sides (that’s why the tricks worked), but that neither side could admit to wanting. That’s a pretty good result, especially considering that Chirac spent essentially none of France’s resources achieving it.

Now, yes, it’s true that it would be nice for some gigantic crew of foreigners to come into Lebanon, disarm Hezbollah, police the border, and create a giant, happy, stable democracy at peace with its neighbors. But nobody really knows how to pull this off. The internal political balance in Lebanon is extremely delicate. Nobody — not Israel, not France, not the United States, not even Hezbollah’s patrons — was or is in a position to actually destroy or disarm Hezbollah absent a wider reform of all of Lebanon. The two most recent revisions to the Lebanese domestic scene — the Taif Accords and the Cedar Revolution — both deliberately involved wink-wink acceptance of Hezbollah’s militia in exchange for Shiites not demanding the level of political power in Beirut that demographic realities would suggest. And — with good reason — nobody wants to open up the pandora’s box of Lebanese consociationalism for further revisions.

From Washington Post:

In the past, “nature” was used to maintain the status quo. A physician at Harvard University once cited biology as a reason to bar women from higher education: All that blood rushing to their brains would be drained from their wombs, he claimed, impairing their ability to bear children. Then the pendulum swung the other way. In the 1960s and ’70s, nearly every aspect of human behavior was attributed to “nurture,” including sex differences. If parents raised children the same way, giving dolls to boys and trucks to girls, they’d grow up acting the same.

In the 1990s, the pendulum swung again: A steady flow of books about evolutionary biology explained nearly every aspect of human behavior as a result of the organism’s urge to get its genes into the next generation — the female by ensuring her offspring’s survival, the male by spreading his sperm far and wide. And books such as Ann Moir and David Jessel’s Brain Sex , Deborah Blum’s Sex on the Brain and Melissa Hines’s Brain Gender provided accounts of gender differences based on brain structure and hormonal chemistry.

More here.

From The Bosoton Globe:

MORAL PHILOSOPHERS and academics interested in studying how humans choose between right and wrong often use thought experiments to tease out the principles that inform our decisions. One particular hypothetical scenario has become quite the rage in some top psychological journals. It involves a runaway trolley, five helpless people on the track, and a large-framed man looking on from a footbridge. He may or may not be about to tumble to his bloody demise: You get to make the call. That’s because in this scenario, you are standing on the footbridge, too. You know that if you push the large man off the bridge onto the tracks, his body will stop the trolley before it kills the five people on the tracks. Of course, he will die in the process. So the question is: Is it morally permissible to kill the man in order to save five others?

In surveys, most people (around 85 percent) say they would not push the man to his death. In his forthcoming book, “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong” (Ecco), and in other recent papers, Hauser suggests we may have a moral “faculty” in our brains that acts as a sort of in-house philosopher-parsing situations quickly, before emotion or conscious reason come into play.

More here.

Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker:

In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”

The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

More here.

Richard Lea in The Guardian:

The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury has had little time for writing over the past month. “First you have to behave as a citizen, and not a writer. If you have one third of your population [taking refuge] in public schools then you have to help. So there is little time for writing.”

For the moment, a ceasefire holds in the Middle East, but for the region’s writers, as for so many others, chaos and disruption continue…

In Tel Aviv, meanwhile, the real world has caught up with Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom. “I used to write books they called postmodern,” she says, “but now it is pure realism.”

Her latest novel, Textile, was published earlier this year. Over the past month she has been writing, “but not a lot”.

More here.

Paul Vitello in the New York Times:

Among lesbians — the group from which most transgendered men emerge — the increasing number of women who are choosing to pursue life as a man can provoke a deep resentment and almost existential anxiety, raising questions of gender loyalty and political identity, as well as debates about who is and who isn’t, and who never was, a real woman.

The conflict has raged at some women’s colleges and has been explored in academic articles, in magazines for lesbians and in alternative publications, with some — oversimplifying the issue for effect — headlined with the question, “Is Lesbianism Dead?”

It has been a subtext of gay politics in San Francisco, the only city in the country that covers employees’ sex-change medical expenses. And it bubbles to the surface every summer at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a lesbian gathering to which only “women born as women and living as women” are invited — a ban on transgendered people of either sex.

More here.

From The New York Times:

He was probably the greatest legislative politician in American history, but he was also one of the most ambitious idealist. He had the rare ability to understand his own flaws and limitations, and he worked hard to overcome them. During the battle over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a reporter asked him why he was fighting so strenuously for a cause to which he had previously demonstrated only a faint commitment. Johnson replied, “Some people get a chance late in life to correct the sins of their youth, and very few get a chance as big as the White House.” Johnson sought power not just to have it, but to use it to accomplish great things — and for a while he was spectacularly successful.

But Johnson was not always at his best. He could be crude, overbearing, arrogant and often cruel. He harbored deep resentments that frequently undermined his own stature. He had terrible relations with the press. He was personally (and sexually) reckless in ways that make Bill Clinton seem a model of rectitude. He pushed his staff and his congressional colleagues so relentlessly that his legislative achievements were often rushed and deeply flawed. And, of course, he was largely responsible for one of the greatest disasters in American history: a war in Vietnam that he inherited, escalated, fiercely defended and failed to examine with the same courage and clarity of mind that he brought to so many other issues. He was, paradoxically, at once one of America’s most successful presidents and one of its most conspicuous failures.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Television can act like a painkiller when it comes to children and is more effective than a mother’s comforting, according to a small Italian study. The University of Siena study, published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, was based on 69 children aged seven to 12 who were divided into three groups to have blood taken. One group was given no distraction while the blood was being taken while mothers of children in the second group attempted to distract the youngsters by talking to them, soothing, and/or caressing them. In the third group, the children were allowed to watch television cartoons while the procedure was being carried out.

From the New York Times:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

 

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s. You too may find them so, in which case Spain’s mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man’s man for you — he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations. Plus Nadal is also Federer’s nemesis and the big surprise of this year’s Wimbledon, since he’s a clay-court specialist and no one expected him to make it past the first few rounds here. Whereas Federer, through the semifinals, has provided no surprise or competitive drama at all. He’s outplayed each opponent so completely that the TV and print press are worried his matches are dull and can’t compete effectively with the nationalist fervor of the World Cup.

More here.  [Thanks, of course, to Asad Raza.]

Charles Glass in the London Review of Books:

Like Israel’s previous enemies, Hizbullah relies on the weapons of the weak: car bombs, ambushes, occasional flurries of small rockets and suicide bombers. The difference is that it uses them intelligently, in conjunction with an uncompromising political programme. Hizbullah’s achievement, perhaps ironically for a religious party headed by men in turbans, is that it belongs to the modern age. It videotaped its ambushes of Israeli convoys for broadcast the same evening. It captured Israeli soldiers and made Israel give up hundreds of prisoners to get them back. It used stage-set cardboard boulders that blew up when Israeli patrols passed. It flew drones over Israel to take reconnaissance photographs – just as the Israelis did in Lebanon. It had a website that was short on traditional Arab bombast and long on facts. If Israelis had faced an enemy like Hizbullah in 1948, the outcome of its War of Independence might have been different. Israel, whose military respect Hizbullah, is well aware of this.

That is why, having failed to eliminate Hizbullah while it occupied Lebanon, Israel is trying to destroy it now. Hizbullah’s unpardonable sin in Israel’s view is its military success. Israel may portray Hizbullah as the cat’s-paw of Syria and Iran, but its support base is Lebanese. Moreover, it does one thing that Syria and Iran do not: it fights for the Palestinians. On 12 July Hizbullah attacked an Israeli army unit, capturing two soldiers. It said it would negotiate indirectly to exchange them for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israel, as it has done in the past. It made clear that its attack was in support of the Palestinians under siege in Gaza after the capture of another Israeli soldier a week earlier. The whole Arab world had remained silent when Israel reoccupied the Gaza settlements and bombed the territory. Hizbullah’s response humiliated the Arab regimes, most of which condemned its actions, as much as it humiliated Israel. No one need have been surprised. Hizbullah has a long history of supporting the Palestinians.

More here.

From New Scientist:

A new silicon chip capable of manipulating the spin of a single electron could ultimately allow futuristic quantum computers to be built using conventional electronic technology, researchers say.

A quantum bit, or “qubit”, is analogous the bits used in conventional computers. But, instead of simply switching between two states, representing “0” and “1”, quantum physics permits a qubit to exist in more than one state simultaneously, until its state is measured.

This means quantum computers can essentially perform multiple calculations at once, giving them the potential to be exponentially more powerful than conventional computers.

Researchers have previously developed rudimentary quantum computers by exploiting exotic phenomena to generate qubits. Two of the most sophisticated methods involve using ions trapped in magnetic fields and electrons in superconducting circuits. However, both approaches are far more complicated than making the chips that power conventional computers.

More here.

Jeff Hecht in New Scientist:

Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact. [See here.]

Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. “The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised,” he says. “Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue.”

Miller’s report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That’s despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. “We don’t seem to be going in the right direction,” Miller says.

More here.

Jack Shafer in Slate:

Reason magazine’s blog, Hit & Run, calls our attention today to a new Government Accountability Office study that casts doubt on official U.S. government estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year.

Scores of news organizations have accepted the 800,000 estimate as credible in their reporting of human trafficking in recent years. Within the last year alone, the figures have appeared, unquestioned, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and NPR, just to name just a few outlets.

But government estimates must always be approached with suspicion, as I wrote earlier this summer, citing Max Singer’s 1971 Public Interest article “The Vitality of Mythical Numbers” and Peter Reuter’s 1984 sequel, “The (Continued) Vitality of Mythical Numbers.”

More here.

“Who speaks for the mostly poor Bangladeshi community in east London? Delwar Hussain charts a long-term shift from secular leftism to Islamism – one in which British state policy has played a significant role.”

From Open Democracy:

The connection between events in Bangladesh and the large Bangladeshi community in east London is intimate but not static. The influence of economic, political and generational change on the transformation of personal and public identities is profound. In particular, there has been a significant movement in recent years from alignment with secular politics as a vehicle of representation and empowerment towards Islamic-based organisation. An important element in this is that the British state has helped create and support this process through its funding policies and its application of a “multicultural” model of relating to and supporting community organisations in the area.

To understand the context of this change, it is necessary to understand the trend of events in the Bangladeshi homeland itself.

More here.

Professor Heebie McJeebie interviews Darcy James Argue, who with Secret Society, will be performing at the 2nd annual 3QD ball. (Via Lindsay Beyerstein.)

The young composer Darcy James Argue conducts Secret Society, an ensemble of urban hippies who perform his original compositions at various underground locations. On August 26 and 27, Secret Society will perform in various outer-boroughs of New York City. I recently spoke with young person Darcy via my MIDI dictaphone.

Professor Heebie McJeebie: After listening to a few minutes of your music, I would categorize you as a “jazz composer,” yet you have studied with at least one composer of serious music, and you are very skilled at music notation. As someone who thinks carefully about writing things down, where do you draw the line between improvisation and composition?

Darcy James Argue: Some jazz musicians feel that improvisation is just composition in real-time. I don’t actually buy this. Open-ended improv is really its own thing, and it creates a very different set of expectations and reactions in the listener than a pre-structured piece does.

As for my own process, I find improvisation can be a great way to generate or mess with raw materials — to fill up the sketchbook with ideas, to assist with the pre-compositional work, and the like. But then I have to hunker down and figure out how to structure those ideas. It’s like what the faculty are always telling the kids at jazz camp: “play drunk, write sober.”

None of this, however, makes Johnson fashionable in academic circles, where many write him off not just as a dead white male, but as a high-church, moralistic, Tory, conservative, monarchist misogynist (take your pick). While it is true that Samuel Johnson continues to find favor with various Johnsonian clubs whose members tend to be cultural conservatives, the real Johnson is much more complex than this narrow pigeon-holing would allow. The high Anglican had Methodist, Presbyterian, Quaker, and other low-church friends, admitted to a lifetime of agonizing doubt about his faith, and was known to kneel in prayer at night with the servants. The ardent Tory was also a lifelong opponent of slavery who fiercely criticized the European conquest of Africa and America, and denounced cruelty to indigenous peoples everywhere. He hated capital punishment. His charity to the poor, the sick, and the miserable was so profound that it sometimes shocked his society friends. The supposed misogynist (“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all”) was actually a major critic of the exploitation of women, a leading advocate of women’s education, and a supportive friend to dozens of women striving for writing careers in an era of male domination. (Mary Wollstonecraft, who met and liked him, put five of Johnson’s works in her feminist anthology, The Female Reader, in 1789.) As Henry Hitchings acknowledges about midway through his superb book, Johnson was in many ways “a progressive liberal.”

more from The Claremont Review here.

If any books change the world, Republic has a good claim to first place. It is commonly regarded as the culminating achievement of Plato as a philosopher and writer, brilliantly poised between the questioning and inconclusive earlier dialogues and the less compelling cosmological speculations and doubts of the later ones. Over the centuries it has probably sustained more commentary, and been subject to more radical and impassioned disagreement, than almost any other of the great founding texts of the modern world. Indeed, the history of readings of the book is itself an academic discipline, with specialist chapters on almost every episode in the story of religion and literature for the past 2,000 years and more. To take only the major English poets, there are entire books on Platonism and Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley and Coleridge, to name but a few, and there are many others on whole movements and times: Plato and Christianity, Plato and the Renaissance, Plato and the Victorians, Plato and the Nazis, Plato and us. The story of Plato’s direct influence on philosophy is another study in itself, one peppered with names such as Philo Judaeus, Macrobius, Porphyry, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, as well as the better-known Plotinus, Augustine or Dante. Sometimes the Plato in question is the author of other texts, notably the inspirational dialogue Symposium and the theologically ambitious Timaeus. But Republic is seldom far away.

more from Guardian Books here.