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.)
In Wired, a few science fiction and fantasy writers answer the challenge to come up with very short stories, six words or fewer!
We’ll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.
Dozens of our favorite auteurs put their words to paper, and five master graphic designers took them to the drawing board. Sure, Arthur C. Clarke refused to trim his (“God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”), but the rest are concise masterpieces.
Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.- William Shatner
Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?- Eileen Gunn
Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love.- David Brin
Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.- Joss Whedon
Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.- Stan Lee
Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time- Alan Moore
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.- Margaret Atwood
In The New York Times:
Milton Friedman, the grandmaster of conservative economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward lesser government and greater reliance on free markets and individual responsibility, died today. He was 94 years old.
A spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation confirmed his death.
Conservative and liberal colleagues alike viewed Mr. Friedman as one of the 20th century’s leading economic scholars, on a par with giants like John Maynard Keynes, Joseph A. Schumpeter and Paul Samuelson.
Flying the flag of economic conservatism, Mr. Friedman led the postwar challenge to the hallowed theories of Lord Keynes, the British economist who maintained that governments had a duty to help capitalistic economies through periods of recession and to prevent boom times from exploding into high inflation.
David P. Barash in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Socrates was made to drink hemlock for having “corrupted the youth of Athens.” Is sociobiology or — as it is more commonly called these days — “evolutionary psychology” similarly corrupting? Although the study of evolution is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting and illuminating of all intellectual enterprises, there is at the same time, and not just in my opinion, something dark about the implications of natural selection for our own behavior.
More here.
From the Plimpton Project (via Yahoo! Picks):
George Plimpton didn’t just write, he threw himself into the ring with his subjects, bringing a dash of bravado to the occupation of journalist. Now, a group of Plimptophiles has crafted an online homage to the man who “attacked life” with such “gusto and grace.” The photos section cuts quickly to the way George went about things: Here he is listening to Muhammad Ali, slouching backstage at Caesar’s, or joking with Jonathan Winters. There he is, caught in full regalia, playing with the Bruins, the Boston Celtics, and the Detroit Lions. No fan ever had it so good. The “Arcana” section features a marvelous collection of his quotes. And we’re glad to know that an effort to erect a larger-than-life-size monument to the author-adventurer is under way. As for whether he should be depicted alongside a bicycle, dangling his boxing mitts, or astride a noble steed, we vote for all three. With gusto and grace.
More here.
From Edge:
Reinventing The Sacred by Stuart A. Kauffman: Stuart A. Kauffman studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Thirty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms “order for free.” He asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a “new” biology:
“While it may sound as if ‘order for free’ is a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution, it’s not so much that I want to challenge Darwinism and say that Darwin was wrong. I don’t think he was wrong at all. I have no doubt that natural selection is an overriding, brilliant idea and a major force in evolution, but there are parts of it that Darwin couldn’t have gotten right. One is that if there is order for free — if you have complex systems with powerfully ordered properties — you have to ask a question that evolutionary theories have never asked: Granting that selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization of complex systems — that is, this order for free — and natural selection? There’s no body of theory in science that does this. There’s nothing in physics that does this, because there’s no natural selection in physics — there’s self organization. Biology hasn’t done it, because although we have a theory of selection, we’ve never married it to ideas of self-organization. One thing we have to do is broaden evolutionary theory to describe what happens when selection acts on systems that already have robust self-organizing properties. This body of theory simply does not exist.”
More here.
From The Harvard Gazette:
World War II, with its influx of multiracial colonial volunteers and billeted American troops, was the caldron that created Great Britain as a state in which race became an instrument of policy and a tool of cultural division. That’s the thesis brought to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on Nov. 2 by Hazel V. Carby, a Yale University scholar of race, gender, and literature. The war, she said, prompted the emergence of Britain “as a modern racialized state.”
As early as 1942, the British Colonial office worried “what the future population of the nation would look like” in the face of a sexual invasion by black soldiers. By 1947, orphans of mixed race probably numbered in the hundreds, but the numbers were regularly inflated. “The lonely piccaninny” became a staple of the popular press, said Carby. It was an image that hid deeper fears of British cultural identity, and anxiety over a disappearing empire. Showing one tabloid image, Carby said, “A British subject is what this piccaninny is not.” In the end, she said, it was this war-induced “homegrown composite racial consciousness … that gave the English national culture its character, its meaning, its substance, and its resonance.”
Homi Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and director of the Humanities Center, introduced Carby, whose work he called a robust confrontation with “intellectual pieties and scholarly orthodoxies.”
More here.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:
Who said this: “It is interesting for me to see this new Bond. Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the center of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.” The speaker is Mathis, a kindly French liaison officer in “Casino Royale,” Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, published in 1953. More than half a century later, we are back with “Casino Royale,” No. 21 in the roster of official Bond films, and we are back with Mathis. As played by Giancarlo Giannini, who was recently seen having his intestines removed in “Hannibal,” he is pouchy, affable, and dangerously wise, and his presence hints that this new adventure will not be an occasion for silliness: no calendar girls, no blundering boffins, no giants with dentures of steel. The same goes for hardware, with rockets and gadgets alike being trimmed to the minimum. It is true that Bond keeps a defibrillator in the glove compartment of his Aston Martin, but, given the cholesterol levels of the kind of people who drive Aston Martins, a heart-starter presumably comes standard, like a wheel jack. Whether Bond has a heart worth starting is another matter.
More here.
Jonathan Weiner in Scientific American:
It was not until a year and a half after his voyage on board the Beagle that Charles Darwin first came face to face with an ape. He was standing by the giraffe house at the London Zoo on a warm day in late March of 1838. The zoo had just acquired an orangutan named Jenny. One of the keepers was teasing her–showing her an apple, refusing to hand it over. Poor Jenny “threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child,” Darwin wrote in a letter to his sister.
In the secret notebooks that he kept after the voyage, Darwin was speculating about evolution from every angle, including the emotional, and he was fascinated by Jenny’s tantrum. What is it like to be an ape? Does an orangutan’s frustration feel a lot like ours? Might she cherish some sense of right and wrong? Will an ape despair because her keeper is breaking the rules–because he is just not playing fair?
More here.
From the Micro Images Blog:
Chalk Dust (2500 X)
For the longest time, I wanted to see what chalk dust looked like up close. It turns out, you dont see all that much more, even at 2500x the dust is pretty fine. It is interesting to see that chalk dust is made up of two general sizes of particles, and that they tend to clump together a bit.
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Stoma (1500 X)
This is one of millions of holes found on the common leaf used for gas exchange in plants. What you see here is a waxy outer layer of leaf. Inside the hole you can also see the remains of two guard cells which help open and close this tiny pore to regulate air and water exchange. This leaf was found dried out already, which means this level of preservation is shocking. I did not expect to find anything so detailed left.
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Cobweb (450 X)
Ever wonder what that very fine cobweb looks like closer up? Well no longer. I wonder if some spiders make more curly webs than others? In the upper left corner, you have a thread of some fiber which shows just how thin the cobwebs are.
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More here.
Daniel S. Silver in American Scientist:
Historian George Sarton often said that science advances in darkness, invisible to the majority of people, who are more interested in battles and other noisier activities. In his 1957 book The Study of the History of Mathematics, Sarton went on to say that if the history of science is secret, then the history of mathematics is doubly so, “for the growth of mathematics is unknown not only to the general public, but even to scientific workers.”
Sarton’s words help us understand why few have ever heard of Arthur Cayley (1821-95) or James Joseph Sylvester (1814-97), two of the most profound and prolific mathematicians of the Victorian era. Cayley’s seminal investigations of matrix algebra, which constituted only a tiny portion of his 967 papers, were crucial for the development of linear algebra. The terms matrix, determinant and Jacobian, familiar to most science students, were invented by Sylvester, an enthusiastic poet who called himself the “mathematical Adam.”
It is not clear when Cayley and Sylvester first met, but by 1847 they were corresponding to share thoughts about mathematics.
More here. [Photo shows Arthur Cayley.]
The echo of Eco still lures philosophers tempted by literary fame. True to their calling, aspirants find the notion occurs to them as a hypothetical.
Suppose, the wannabe star reflects, I combine the profundities of truth and meaning I handle with my left hand in seminars with the fast-paced narrative ratiocination I prize in mysteries (the books I actually consume instead of rereading philosophy texts assigned in those seminars). Then I soak it all in the sex, blood, and historical detail that attracts me as a run-of-the-mill cultural citizen.
Wouldn’t I rival the success of Umberto Eco himself, whose The Name of the Rose (1983), with its wonderfully deductive William of Baskerville and his terribly loyal sidekick Adso, conquered international best-seller lists in the 1980s and launched the Bologna professor of semiotics on a heady mass-market career?
more from The Chronicle Review here.
The great Peter De Vries, when asked about the nature of his ambition, replied that he yearned for a mass audience that would be large enough for his elite audience to despise. In this latest volume of his tragicomic autobiography, Clive James admits twice to a similar aspiration. Meeting the dazzling Nicholas Tomalin and accidentally making a good impression on him with a piece of gaucherie about wine, he finds (or fancies) that Tomalin is describing him round town as “the boy from the bush who could quote Wittgenstein”. Looking back at the close of North Face of Soho, he rues his own tendency to fall for projects “that would duplicate the effects of the Italian Renaissance while helping to save the baby seals in the rain forest”. The first of these moments comes just as James has left the Footlights in Cambridge to launch himself in the metropolis, and the second occurs when he is back home in Cambridge trying to recuperate from the flopperoo that was the West End launch of his mock-epic poem about the grooming of Prince Charles. This, in other words, is about that weird transitional interlude “the 1970s”; a decade of “becoming” for many boomers. He faithfully notes that many people tried to warn him about the “Charles Charming” fiasco – Mark Boxer discreetly, James Fenton firmly, your humble servant rudely and coarsely – so here might be the place to state that the 70s in London would have been infinitely less amusing without the willingness of Clive James to take chances including – which is that most vertiginous of all risks – the danger of making himself look ridiculous.
more from the TLS here.
“When in doubt, dot,” Jennifer Bartlett has said, and so, as though to keep herself from doubting — her creativity? herself? — she obsessively dots, creating vivid grids of color dots. Sometimes grids within grids, as in Random Sequence, Random Changing Space and Color Titles with Samples (the subtitles of a stunning series of Untitled works from 1969). A useful way of understanding Bartlett is via of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, with its Democritean vision of nature as a system of atoms in motion. It was an enlightened scientific view intended to liberate people from animistic superstition, which sees every natural thing — a mountain, a tree, a stream — as inhabited by some deity who must be appeased and of whom one must be wary. But there’s one catch to the system: Venus starts it. She sets the invisible atoms in motion: They “swerve” — deviate ever so slightly from their neat paths — to converge, forming molecules of visible matter, because of the goddess’ power. Eros gets the cosmos going and keeps it moving, generates its complex togetherness. Eros keeps it from running down — becoming an entropic grid.
more from Artnet here.
It is as if some gauze or screen has been dissolved away from life, that was dulling it, and like Miranda you want to say, What a brave new world! You don’t remember feeling like this, because, younger, habit or the press of necessity prevented. You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.
—Doris Lessing, Time Bites
Doris Lessing, who turned eighty-seven in October, is telling us what “old” feels like. Not a believer in “the golden age of youth,” she “shudders” at the very idea of living through her teens again, even her twenties. Since she left Africa for England more than half a century ago, a single mother and a high school dropout with a wardrobe full of avatars—angry young woman, mother superior, bad-news bear, bodhisattva—she has published an astonishing fifty-five books. Although Time Bites is her first collection of articles, lectures, book reviews, and broadcasts, The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog is her twenty-fifth novel. Nor does the fact that she’s four inches shorter than she used to be make her a shrinking violet. “Old” is as nice as she gets in Time Bites. Her default mode is usually imperious, as if ex cathedrawere the normal respiration of her intelligence.
more from the NY Review of Books here.
From Science:
Imagine recharging your cell phone without plugging it in. Or powering your iPod while you walk around the house with it. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have taken the first steps towards such wireless energy transfer by conceptualizing a way to transmit electricity over room-size distances. One day, they say, the technology could power whole households or even motor vehicles wirelessly.
The MIT team calls the concept a nonradiative electromagnetic field. It involves two simple ring-shaped devices made of copper. One, connected to a conventional power source, would generate magnetic fields similar to those that power electric motors. These fields would stretch outward a few meters and would only affect the receiving–or companion device–which would be outfitted with a second copper ring tuned to a specific frequency. Team leader Marin Soljačić says he began working on the concept because he wanted to find a better alternative to having to recharge his laptop computer and cell phone so frequently. He presented the team’s findings today at an American Institute of Physics forum in San Francisco, California.
More here.
From Scientific American:
People who ate soy regularly as children have a lower risk of breast cancer, researchers reported on Tuesday. And men who eat fish several times a week have a lower risk of colon cancer, a second team of researchers told a meeting in Boston of the American Association for Cancer Research. The studies add to a growing body of evidence about the role of diet in cancer. Cancer experts now believe that up to two-thirds of all cancers come from lifestyle factors such as smoking, diet and lack of exercise.
Dr. Larissa Korde of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues at the University of Hawaii studied studied 597 Asian-American women with breast cancer and 966 women without the disease. The mothers of some of the women were also available to answer questions about what they fed their daughters as children. The women who ate the most soy-based foods such as tofu and miso when aged 5 to 11 reduced their risk of developing breast cancer by 58 percent, the researchers found. “Childhood soy intake was significantly associated with reduced breast cancer risk in our study, suggesting that the timing of soy intake may be especially critical,” Korde said. It is not clear how soy might prevent cancer, although compounds in soy called isoflavones have estrogen-like effects.
More here.
