George Scialabba reviews God’s Universe by Owen Gingrich, in the Boston Globe:

The eminent Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich also covers a lot of ground in comparatively few pages, but “God’s Universe” (coming in September) is an argument rather than a history. Gingerich is a theist and a believer in intelligent design, though not in Intelligent Design, which poses as an alternative to Darwinism. Gingerich accepts Darwinism. But he denies that either Darwinism or modern cosmology makes the existence of God less likely. On the contrary, by demonstrating the extreme improbability, the sheer fortuitousness, of cosmic and biological evolution, both Darwinism and cosmology make the existence of a creator more plausible. The likelihood that a complex protein, for example, will form by accident, by hit-or-miss evolution, is, according to one calculation, 1 in 10{+3}{+2}{+1}. Science has revealed an astoundingly “finely textured tapestry of connections.” It might all be chance, he concedes, but mightn’t there be a smidgen of purpose, an occasional shaping touch?

Gingerich pleads for separating physics from metaphysics, efficient causes from final causes, how from why. He is more earnest, less jaunty, than Vilenkin, but just as likable and as knowledgeable. In the end, he persuaded even a hardened skeptic like me that there might, possibly, be more to the cosmos than is dreamt of in my philosophy.

More here.

In the Boston Globe:

[A] growing number of neuroscientists and psychologists are starting to ask exactly that question. Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians’ brains and found that the “chills” that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated by food and sex.

As evidence mounts that we’re somehow hard-wired to be musical, some thinkers are turning their attention to the next logical question: How did that come to be? And as the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes in his just-published book, “This is Your Brain on Music,” “To ask a question about a basic, omnipresent human ability is to implicitly ask questions about evolution.”

The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time-archeologists have found musical instruments dating from 34,000 BC, and some believe that a 50,000-year-old hollowed-out bear bone from a Neanderthal campsite is an early flute-does suggest that it may indeed be an innate human tendency. And yet it’s unclear what purpose it serves.

[Hat tip: Chandan]

From The Chicago Tribune:

Five years after Sept. 11, seven out of 10 first responders and workers who toiled at the World Trade Center suffer from chronic lung ailments that probably will last the rest of their lives, doctors said Tuesday in announcing the largest-ever study of Sept. 11 health effects.

The study of nearly 9,500 police, paramedics, construction workers and others by physicians at Mt. Sinai Medical Center represents the first scientific evidence linking dust and debris to those health woes, vindicating doctors and patients who for years insisted the connection was undeniable. The study focused mostly on the so-called World Trade Center cough, the main concern of health experts and advocates. Doctors at Mt. Sinai also said they expect to find cancer among the study’s participants in coming years. (Image)

More here.

From Scientific American:

Young doctors in their first year out of medical school regularly toil beyond highly publicized new limits on their working hours, according to newly published results from a Web-based survey. The work limits, which went into effect three years ago, were meant to address the concern that hospitals overburdened these physicians in training, or residency, thereby putting patients at risk of serious medical errors. Another survey finds that the extended hours made first-year residents more likely to jab or cut themselves with a needle or scalpel.

Working 80 to 100 hours a week or even more was long considered normal for residents, on the grounds that such training taught them to operate under stress and provide complete patient care. Of course, grueling hours also double a resident’s chance of getting into a car crash and make them one third more likely to commit a serious error, studies had found. In June 2003, prompted by proposed legislation to restrict residents’ hours, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education began limiting residents to 30 consecutive hours and 80 hours a week, averaged over four weeks.

More here.

Anne Casselman in Seed Magazine:

The female mosquito is a deadly blood-seeking machine, armed with finely attuned antennae and a proboscis serrated for easy entry. In some species, she’ll fly as far as 50 miles to find her blood meal, which she needs to lay her eggs. Her offspring later emerge to breed, feed and continue their life cycle—as well as those of the parasites and viruses that they transmit. One bite is all it takes to contract disease.

No wonder the battle against them has reached the level of high-tech devices and chemical warfare. Legions of scientists are hard at work to foil their blood-letting by figuring out how to best repel, trap or simply disable their ability to hunt us down.

Each year mosquitoes infect some 700 million people worldwide with disease. Malaria alone killed more than a million people in 2005. The first human case of West Nile virus (which is also spread by mosquitoes) hit New Mexico in 2004, and it’s since popped up in all 48 continental states.

More here.

Lorrie Moore in the New York Review of Books:

That Welty had charismatic friendliness in abundance—her combination of shyness and gregariousness won over everyone—was never in her lifetime in doubt. She was a natural storyteller, a wit, and a clown. “If this sofa could talk,” she said once to Reynolds Price, looking at the bedraggled plastic furnishings of the only rental room Price could find for them in Tuscaloosa, “we would have to burn it.” All of Welty’s endearing qualities are underscored by Suzanne Marrs’s recent biography of her, the only one ever authorized by Welty. An unauthorized one appeared in 1998, Eudora: A Writer’s Life, by Ann Waldron (who without Welty’s approval began to feel shunned by Welty’s fiercely protective friends and a bit sorry for herself, perceiving that she was rather literally disapproved of, the perennially “uninvited guest”). Welty at the time of Waldron’s completed book was eighty-nine and unable to read for long spells. (Thank goodness, suggests Jacksonian Marrs, the anointed biographer.) Still, despite the biblical saying, a prophet is not often without honor in her own country: Welty was a goddess in Jackson. What a prophet is often without is privacy, peace, and any real depth of comprehension among her fellow citizens. And although this is not the task or accomplishment of literary biography, that Suzanne Marrs has waited until after Welty’s death to publish Eudora Welty is certainly a beginning to all three.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting? column at ABC News:

…the standard [creationists’] argument goes roughly as follows. A very long sequence of individually improbable mutations must occur in order for a species or a biological process to evolve.

If we assume these are independent events, then the probability of all of them occurring and occurring in the right order is the product of their respective probabilities, which is always an extremely tiny number.

Thus, for example, the probability of getting a 3, 2, 6, 2, and 5 when rolling a single die five times is 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 or 1/7,776 — one chance in 7,776.

The much longer sequences of fortuitous events necessary for a new species or a new process to evolve leads to the minuscule numbers that creationists argue prove that evolution is so wildly improbable as to be essentially impossible.

This line of argument, however, is deeply flawed.

More here.  [Improbable photo shows Paulos with llamas in Peru.]

Chuck Stephens in The Criterion Collection:

…alongside the seven blade runners of Akira Kurosawa’s sword-toting supergroup there might have strode an extra warrior—an “eighth samurai.”

In fact, the existence of a supernumerary slice-artist among those Seven Samurai has been verifiable all along, and sharp-eyed cineastes will have long since spotted his inaugural if momentary membership in that Kurosawa-gumi, just as you can today—by scanning and rescanning the frames between the film’s ten-minute-sixteen- and ten-minute-nineteen-second marks. The fleetingly glimpsed swordsman who saunters through those scant few frames of screen time has no bearing on that 1954 classic’s surrounding narrative, and if you blinked through those three seconds, his absence would remain unfelt—he is but one stubbly bearded mercenary among the many potential warriors-for-hire that the film’s desperate rice farmers observe striding through the city, his only attribute an attitude of indifference, another replacement killer, cameo’ed and left unnamed. But for Tatsuya Nakadai—then a contract player at Shochiku Studios and not yet twenty-three years old—those flash-frames in the spotlight would prove three of the most decisive seconds in front of a camera an actor ever spent.

More here.  [Thanks to David Maier.]

Victor Brombert reviews Flaubert: A Biography by Frederick Brown, in the Times Literary Supplement:

Flaubert maintained that a writer should never celebrate himself, that he should in fact pretend not to have lived. He claimed to be an “homme plume”, a pen man, and that the only adventures in his life were the sentences he wrote. Yet he was not always tied to his desk, quill in hand. He travelled to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Greece. In Paris, in 1848, he witnessed the street fighting and the violence of the mob. He frequented some of the most notable people of the period: the sculptor James Pradier, the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, the critic Sainte-Beuve, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, George Sand – with whom he developed a tender friendship – Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, and Maupassant, who considered himself Flaubert’s disciple. He had a turbulent affair with the writer Louise Colet, one of the most flamboyant women of the century.

More here.

In the Harvard Internation Review, Pepper Culpepper and Archon Fung discuss how the EU can move forward after last year’s rejections of the EU constitution.

European leaders remain divided as to how, or even whether, to move forward with the constitutional project. Political strategies in the aftermath of the rejection of the new constitution have followed two general tracks. The first, common among politicians and bureaucrats who favor further EU integration, is to take some of the institutional pieces proposed in the constitution—such as a single, more powerful EU foreign minister—and ratify them individually, perhaps in national parliaments. Proponents of this approach, such as EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso, stress that such measures would streamline decision-making in a European Union of 25 members. The second view, voiced especially by Euro-skeptic politicians and many scholars who study the European Union, such as Princeton University’s Andrew Moravcsik, holds that the defeat of the constitution has at last dashed the silly idea of a European super-state. Having largely succeeded in building incremental projects that national governments wanted—notably the single market and single currency—the European Union should stick to creating similar projects in the future. The ideal of a federal Europe long promoted by those seeking “ever closer union” is dead: good riddance!

These two views miss a fundamental driver of the constitutional treaty’s rejection: the deep alienation of many European citizens from the project of integration. Both the Euro-philes and Euro-skeptics take an essentially technocratic perspective and seek to advance their respective agendas along the least politically resistant path. Both groups focus on what the European Union can achieve without referenda because they cannot secure sufficient popular support for their agendas. In a union of democratic member-states, however, this approach is self-defeating and illegitimate. Popular disaffections manifested in national referenda are only superficial symptoms of a deeper democratic malaise within the member-states themselves. None of the European project’s broader goals can be achieved durably without addressing that root cause.

In the Economist:

IN THE 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by manipulating the logical statement “all ravens are black”, you could derive the equivalent “all non-black objects are non-ravens”. Such topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to keep philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they cannot do too much damage. However, a number of computer scientists, led by Fernando Esponda of Yale University, are taking Hempel’s notion as the germ of an eminently practical scheme. They are applying such negative representations to the problem of protecting sensitive data. The idea is to create a negative database. Instead of containing the information of interest, such a database would contain everything except that information.

The concept of a negative database took shape a couple of years ago, while Dr Esponda was working at the University of New Mexico with Paul Helman, another computer scientist, and Stephanie Forrest, an expert on modelling the human immune system. The important qualification concerns that word “everything”. In practice, that means everything in a particular set of things.

In ScienceNOW Daily News:

The life of African-American middle-school students can be pretty stressful. From the moment they step into the classroom, some must contend with not only coursework but also the anxiety that performing badly might confirm negative stereotypes. That fear can itself lead to poor performance, researchers have known for a while; now they’ve come up with a simple antidote: getting students to reflect on their sense of self-worth by writing a personal essay about what they value.

Geoffrey Cohen, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues tested the strategy among 243 seventh graders at a northeastern U.S. school that had a roughly 50:50 ratio of African-American and white students. Each student was asked to complete a 15-minute writing assignment that included a page with a list of values such as one’s relationships with friends, athletic ability, and creativity. Students circled their top two or three values. On the next page, they wrote a few sentences explaining their choices and describing moments when they had felt the importance of the chosen values. The researchers designed a similar assignment for a control group in which students had to circle the value they thought was least important to them and explain why that value could be important to other people. The students were not told the purpose of the assignment.

From BBC:

Downtown is transformed – the gaping gash of the World Trade Center remains largely unfilled. The pit is acquiring the machinery which will be the working engine of the Freedom Tower, and there is a new underground station, but Ground Zero is still a wound. And that gives a different look to the whole city. The twin towers were a landmark that could be seen all over Manhattan so if you emerged from the subway, you only had to look up and know which direction you were facing.

The gap when you look down 7th Avenue, for example, now feels like something is missing – which, of course, there is. The open sky seems like the absence of a limb or a pair of teeth knocked out.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Resembling nothing so much as Chewbacca’s children, two of the world’s tiniest monkeys debuted recently at the Frösö Zoo in Ostersund, Sweden. Shown here shortly after their birth, these pygmy marmosets are exceedingly rare. It’s not because they’re twins though—pygmy marmosets are typically born in pairs—but because they’re albinos, deficient in pigment.

The world’s smallest species of monkey, this tree-dwelling marmoset makes big noise, contributing clicks, whistles, and squeals to the cacophony of their home habitat, the western Amazon rain forest of South America. Adults grow to about 5 inches (13 centimeters) in length and weigh about 6 ounces (170 grams).

More here.

Naoya Hatakeyama. Blast #8316. 1995-2003.

More of this fabulous artist’s work can be seen here and here.

Reyhan Harmanci in the San Francisco Chronicle:

While his views may not be popular in Northern California, Wallace Sampson, clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University and editor in chief of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, is frank about his thoughts about alternative medicine. “It doesn’t exist,” he says. “We’ve looked into most of the practices and, biochemically or physically, their supposed effects lie somewhere between highly improbable and impossible.”

There are two major misconceptions about acupuncture, Sampson says, and both contribute to the misunderstanding of its worth as medical treatment. First, most people assume that it’s an ancient Chinese cure that has existed, unchanging, for centuries. Not so, says Sampson, noting that “acupuncture was formalized in a complex way over the past 100 years, mostly in Europe and France and after the Communist takeover in China. Before that time there was no consistent formalization of acupuncture points or what each place was supposed to do. It was largely regional, and the thinking varied from city to city.”

More here.

Harry Reynolds reviews Spoiling for a Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer by Brooke Masters, at Nth Position:

Spitzer, transforming what attorney generals do, attacked midwestern power plants for polluting New York, ripped into the Food Emporium and A&P, Gristedes and other major supermarkets and drugstore chains, for mindboggling working conditions of immigrant deliverymen, and convicted the first felonious sweatshop operator in a decade. His unsuccessful attempt to bring gun manufacturers under control proved him a man of initiative, practical, yet moral, quick to learn early the golden lesson of watching one’s back even when dealing with one’s apparent ally, a lesson he may have occasion to recall when governor. As for righteous anger, when the Red Cross attempted to divert 9/11 funds to its other causes, Spitzer seized it, as it were, by the neck, compelling it to use every cent for 9/11 victims.

Turning towards Wall Street, Spitzer saw hanging fruit ripe for the taking. When Merrill Lynch was taken by Spitzer in the direction of the gallows for bid rigging, its attorney, Robert Morvillo, warned Spitzer that “Merrill Lynch has a lot of powerful friends”.

More here.

On 28 September 2006, at 7 p.m., the London Review of Books will host a public debate in the Great Hall, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Cooper Square, New York, on the subject:

Panellists: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer, Dennis Ross

Moderator: Anne-Marie Slaughter

Tickets for the debate are $25 per person. You can buy them online from Ticket Central at: www.ticketcentral.com/index.asp?p=promocode&pid=5020 or telephone: +1 212 279 4200

More info here.

Via Yahoo! Picks:

Since the beginning of 2000, excluding the times that he forgets, Noah K. has taken a daily photo of himself. At the beginning of each month, he uploads the self-portraits to his web site, where interested parties can scroll through day after day of his likeness. Sometimes he appears in the dark, sometimes his face is well-lit. Always, he sports a grave expression, as if something might be about to happen that requires concentration or reserve. Now, Noah has spliced the images together into a video… Watching the loop, it’s hard not to fixate on the changing background, the ebb and flow of Noah’s hair, or the fluctuating colors of his shirts, because as the years fly past, Noah’s sober face and dark brown eyes remain amazingly—almost eerily—steadfast.

Noah’s site here.

In the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt takes another look at Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism (which Cosma Shalizi will tell you is the magesterial piece on the topic) and the history and future of the movement.

Main Currents of Marxism is not the only first-rate account of Marxism, though it is by far the most ambitious. What distinguishes it is Kolakowski’s Polish perspective. This probably explains the emphasis in his account on Marxism as an eschatology —”a modern variant of apocalyptic expectations which have been continuous in European history.” And it licenses an uncompromisingly moral, even religious reading of twentieth-century history:

The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.

No Western commentator on Marxism, however critical, ever wrote like that.

But then Kolakowski writes as someone who has lived not just inside Marxism but under communism. He was witness to Marxism’s transformation from an intellectual theorem to a political way of life. Thus observed and experienced from within, Marxism becomes difficult to distinguish from communism—which was, after all, not only its most important practical outcome but its only one. And the daily deployment of Marxist categories for the vulgar purpose of suppressing freedom—which was their primary use value to Communists in power—detracts over time from the charms of the theorem itself.