From MSNBC:

Humans walking on two legs consume only a quarter of the energy that chimpanzees use while “knuckle-walking” on all fours, according to a new study.

The finding, detailed in the July 17 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports the idea that early humans became bipedal as a way to reduce energy costs associated with moving about.

“Walking upright on two legs is a defining feature that makes us human,” said study leader Herman Pontzer, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It distinguishes our entire lineage from all other apes.”

More here.

Naiza H. Khan. Picture 4 in the series Henna Hands.

(figure composed of imprints of henna covered hands on a city wall).

Larger view of the setting (especially for Abbas):

More on this young Pakistani artist here.

Louise Uchitelle in the New York Times:

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back, and Mr. Weill is prominent among the new titans. His net worth exceeds $1 billion, not counting the $500 million he says he has already given away, in the open-handed style of Andrew Carnegie and the other great philanthropists of the earlier age.

More here.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times Book Review:

In their chilling and timely book Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, and Aziz Z. Huq, who directs the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center, argue that the Bush administration’s “monarchist claims of executive power” are “unprecedented on this side of the North Atlantic,” and that its “executive unilateralism not only undermines the delicate balance of our Constitution, but also lessens our human liberties and hurts vital counterterrorism campaigns” by undermining America’s moral authority and standing in the world.

More here.

From The London Times:

It was, as one tabloid headline put it, the Queen’s Annie Horribilis. A reported royal temper tantrum sparked last week’s mad hubbub in which the press jumped up and down reciting terrible puns, BBC bosses contritely laid their foreheads in the dust and there were calls for the world’s most famous celebrity photographer to have her head chopped off. When Annie Leibovitz asked the Queen to remove her crown during a photo shoot at Buck Palace, she little suspected she would become the subject of what picture editors quaintly call a “reverse ferret”.

But such failures are rare. Nearly 6ft tall and often clad in black, the 57-year-old photographer can seem intimidating. After all, Leibovitz has clocked up a lot of mileage. She was 24 when she became Rolling Stone magazine’s chief photographer and only a year older when she rode out on Richard Nixon’s helicopter as he fled the White House. She toured America with the Rolling Stones and picked up a cocaine habit that took five years to shed. Now she is the world’s highest paid portrait photographer, worth £50,000 a shoot. Up close, say interviewers, she is witty and warm, attributing her joie de vivre to late motherhood. She was 52 when her daughter Sarah was born in 2001, sending the gossip columns into overdrive.

Bizarrely, they announced she had had a baby with Susan Sontag, the writer. In fact, Leibovitz had conceived with donated sperm, and in 2005 her twins Susan and Samuelle were born to a surrogate mother. The exact nature of her 15-year relationship with Sontag has been a subject of speculation. “Susan and I are really just really great, great friends but we don’t live together,” she insisted. They shared the same block in the West Village but not the same apartment. Later, she conceded in her book A Photographer’s Life that “with Susan, it was a love story”. She finally said the term “lover” was fine with her.

More here.

From Indiafm:

PARZANIA, directed by Rahul Dholakia, affects you. Not only does the film unfold the Godhra riots and aftermath on screen, it also narrates the heart-rending story of a Parsi family and how it loses its 10-year-old kid to the riots. The message is clear: The common man is most affected when catastrophe strikes!

The wounds may have begun to heal, but the atrocities leave behind scars that are difficult to conceal. PARZANIA doesn’t talk of politicians or the reasons that triggered off the riots. It tells you of a family whose lives go topsy-turvy during the riots. Allan [Corin Nemec], an American, arrives in Ahmedabad searching for answers, praying to find internal peace and understand the world and his troubled life. Allan has chosen India as his school and Gandhi as his subject. It’s here that he meets Cyrus and his loving family. Cyrus [Naseeruddin Shah] lives with his wife Shernaz [Sarika], son Parzan [Parzan Dastur] and daughter Dilshad [Pearl Barsiwala]. Communal riots break out in the city and the Hindus target this housing colony. In the midst of terror and violence, Parzan disappears. The heart-broken family begins their search for Parzan.

PARZANIA packs in a solid punch in those two hours. The story actually takes off when hundreds of Hindus attack the colony. The helpless residents find themselves in a quandary. From this point onwards, right till the finale, PARZANIA has the power to keep you glued to the proceedings.

More here.

Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books:

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

More here.

Leo Goldsmith at the Not Coming to a Theater Near You website:

When Eadweard Muybridge began his series of proto-cinematic studies of movement in the late 1870s, he was already drawing upon science of human perception that had been around for at least forty years—albeit in reverse. Muybridge’s work was based on the notion that the movement of objects in space could be broken down into individual photographic frames, but already by the 1830s the zoetrope and phenakistoscope (whose name means “to deceive the viewer”) proved that flat images assembled linearly viewed rapidly in succession could create the illusion of moving objects. While a photographer like Muybridge used this science to study the movement of animals in single moments in time, mathematicians and physicists like Joseph Plateau and George Horner were already using drawing and painting to create small, narrative illusions.

This is to suggest that not only is animation an important part of what we now call cinema, one that predates and predicts it, but that it is perhaps even the very basis of film.

More here.

Fatemeh Keshavarz in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The recent arrest in Iran of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has ignited a storm of protest around the Western world. To many Americans, it is but one more sign that Iran, in particular, and the Muslim Middle East, in general, are inhospitable to women and to freethinkers. For some years, America’s popular reading list has bolstered that view, ignoring political complexities of the region in favor of a simple narrative.

Best sellers like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (Riverhead Books, 2003), and Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul (Little, Brown, 2003) have enforced and embellished the one-sided picture of Middle Eastern culture. Call it the “New Orientalism.”

In the 1970s, Edward W. Said’s influential Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978) offered a decisive critique of entrenched Western assumptions that construed Europe as the norm, from which the “exotic” and “inscrutable” Orient deviates. Not infallible — but certainly profound and engaging — Said’s views fired the imagination of such influential scholars as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, now central to postcolonial and subaltern studies.

More here.

Click here to watch video and/or read the transcript. [Thanks to M. Basit Qari.]

Watch the video on bloggingheads.tv, Sean Carroll and George Johnson on Einstein, string theory, scientists as bloggers and more.

Choosing to discuss the idea of “Europe’s soul” carries the inverse implication – or perhaps it is more a suspicion – that Europe lacks such a thing. It would also seem to suggest that what is missing from the European project is a vision of the future, or a dream. If that is the case, we must do something about it, whether that means “we”, the Europeans, or “they”, the policymakers.

For most Europeans, Europe has become an abstract, alien entity. They are no longer sure whether they should identify with it or dissociate themselves from it, whether they feel represented or repressed. As such, the image of Europe is a contradictory one. The word “image” is useful; Europe’s image is something quite different from the picture we have of our continent. An image is also a make, a brand, the product of a long series of past images, of stories, of tradition, of propaganda, of personal experience and reputation. Our feelings about Europe’s soul relate mainly to this image. Europe needs to regain its tarnished self-esteem, in order that it can recover its soul.

more from The New Statesman here.

Beyond the graphic-design friendliness of their common initials and the fact that they exhibit with the same gallery, bringing together Louise Bourgeois and Lynda Benglis is a curatorial natural. They are both inveterate explorers of sculpture’s soggy underbelly, doyennes of dark sexuality and the nebulous space between the personal and the universal.

But the coupling is not without edge: These are women of markedly different generations whose attitudes towards the body and the sculptural object come to bear in relation to their work. Ms. Bourgeois, the older artist by thirty years, is steeped in Surrealism and the ethnographic interests of her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, while Ms. Benglis is of the generation of conceptual artists who emerged in the wake of minimal art and Pop Art. They are, variously, self-consciously out of time and of their time. Still, this a show where you often have to check the wall label because of the degree of overlap in material quality and form vocabulary of these two artists. It is a coupling, in other words, underwritten by formalism, despite the fact that the art is often anti-formalist in intention and effect.

more from Artcritical here.

Philosophers once aimed to teach us serenity. Buddha smiled as he contemplated the void and Socrates drank his dose of hemlock in the same spirit of wise acceptance. Philosophy today has a different agenda: its gift to us is a contagious fear, as it terrorises us into awareness of our world’s dangerous fragility. Even before you open John Gray’s book, its cover tells you to be afraid, to be very afraid. The design couples a black mass with a bloodbath. Ants pullulate in the mire and gore: the lord of the flies has unleashed an infestation of pests. Is this the plague of insects that overran Maoist China when the peasants, browbeaten into the defence of the leader’s agricultural regime, battered all the sparrows to death? Man, seeking to unseat God, imagines heaven is within his reach. Instead he creates hell on earth.

more from The Guardian here.

In the LA Times, Hamas takes a turn to addressing the US directly:

HAMAS’ RESCUE of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers.

It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law — a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Yet our movement is continually linked by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ideologies that they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its adherents. But we are not part of a broader war. Our resistance struggle is no one’s proxy, although we welcome the support of people everywhere for justice in Palestine.

(A response can be found here.)

Richard Boudreaux in LA Times (one of a three part series):

Years after Israel seized a hilltop artillery post from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War and turned it into a Jewish neighborhood, a civic-minded resident launched a turf battle of her own.

Ruth Geva thought that Ramot Allon, a community originally built for secular Jews, needed a police station. But she had to campaign eight years for a place to put one. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish families, known to Israelis as haredim, were moving in and seeking space for synagogues and religious schools.

In 2004 the community got its station. Then last year Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox mayor ordered it closed on a month’s notice and handed the building to an ultra-Orthodox kindergarten.

Furious over the decision and weary of the demands of her devout neighbors, Geva is giving up and moving to Israel’s Mediterranean coast.

“They get all the services and the city remains poor,” said Geva, 59, a community safety consultant. “They take a little bite each time, and finally people like me no longer feel comfortable here.”

Forty years ago, when Israel captured East Jerusalem and absorbed the Arab neighborhoods, it set out to maintain a large and sustainable Jewish majority in the city it was declaring its eternal and undivided capital. Instead, Jerusalem is gradually becoming more Palestinian and less Jewish.

More here.

A while ago I posted a poem by Robert Pinski entitled “Samurai Song”. I didn’t realize then that the poem was based on this:

Based on Confucian, Shinto, Buddhist and Zen principles, the samurai developed a code which came to be known as ‘bushido’ or the Way of the Warrior. The Samurai Creed, believed to have been written by an anonymous warrior in the 14th century, depicts the fusion between these religious elements and their influence on the Bushido.

Samurai Creed

I have no parents; I make the Heavens and the Earth my parents.
I have no home; I make the Tan T’ien my home.
I have no divine power; I make honesty my Divine Power.
I have no means; I make Docility my means.
I have no magic power; I make personality my Magic Power.
I have neither life nor death; I make A Um my Life and Death.

I have no body; I make Stoicism my Body.
I have no eyes; I make The Flash of Lightning my eyes.
I have no ears; I make Sensibility my Ears.
I have no limbs; I make Promptitude my Limbs.
I have no laws; I make Self-Protection my Laws.

I have no strategy; I make the Right to Kill and the Right to Restore Life my Strategy.
I have no designs; I make Seizing the Opportunity by the Forelock my Designs.
I have no miracles; I make Righteous Laws my Miracle.
I have no principles; I make Adaptability to all circumstances my Principle.
I have no tactics; I make Emptiness and Fullness my Tactics.

I have no talent; I make Ready Wit my Talent.
I have no friends; I make my Mind my Friend.
I have no enemy; I make Incautiousness my Enemy.
I have no armor; I make Benevolence my Armor.
I have no castle; I make Immovable Mind my Castle.
I have no sword; I make No Mind my Sword

From here.

Michael Sperber in Harvard Magazine:

For escape, Olmsted frequented the woods.

My mother died while I was so young that I have but a tradition of memory rather than the faintest recollection of her. While I was a small school boy, if I was asked if I remembered her, I could say ‘Yes; I remember playing in the grass and looking up at her while she sat sewing under a tree….’ [I]t has always been a delight to me to see a woman sitting under a tree, sewing and minding a child.

It is not far-fetched to suppose that Olmsted came into his calling because he sought with every fiber of his being to realize that vision. By introducing nature to the urban scene, he offered respite from the pathogenic influences of city life, “the symptoms of which,” he wrote, “are nervous tension, over-anxiety, hasteful disposition, impatience, [and] irritability.” Such symptoms could be reversed through exposure to pleasing rural scenery: “It is thus, in medical phrase, a prophylactic and therapeutic agent of value….”

In a tragic irony, Olmsted had to be hospitalized, at McLean, for the last five years of his life. His medical record is sealed, but whatever the problem, it undoubtedly exacerbated the earlier posttraumatic stress disorder. He was alert enough, nevertheless, to note that certain of his concepts had been disregarded in the hospital-grounds construction: he complained to a family member, “They didn’t follow my plan, confound them!

More here.

Photo of Back Bay Fens, Boston. More on Boston’s Emeral Necklace, designed by Olmstead, here.

Robert Irwin at TLS:

Countrymen passed bristling over with arms, each with a huge bellyful of pistols and daggers in his girdle; fierce, but not the least dangerous. Wild swarthy Arabs, who had come in with the caravans, walked solemnly about, very different in demeanour from the sleek inhabitants of the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked, their shops tended by sallow faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled and welcomed you in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colours; and women with black nosebags and shuffling yellow slippers, chattered and bargained at the doors of the little shops.

So Thackeray described the bazaar in Smyrna in Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. This evocation of crowds, costumes and racial types was a cliché in Orientalist travel writing; for example, Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad, wrote of the thronging inhabitants of Istanbul as follows: “No two men were dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes – every struggling throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts”. And there is much more in the same vein.

More here.

Here’s a piece in the Forward from about a month ago on Steven Weinberg’s decision to cancel a speech at Imperial College London on the 50th anniversary of Abdus Salam’s arrival at Imperial College. The reason for the cancelation was the growing movement to boycott Israeli academia among English academics. The thrust of the article is more about the friendship between Salam and Weinberg.

Weinberg, whose father was a court stenographer, had graduated from Bronx High School of Science and studied Salam’s work in renormalization when he was a graduate student. That shared interest set the pair apart — “It was a bit out of fashion,” said physicist Tom Kibble, a contemporary of theirs at Imperial — and led to their first meeting, in 1960, at the University of California, Berkeley. Weinberg had recently become an assistant professor there; Salam, only 34, was already a member of Britain’s Royal Society.

“He had wonderful moustaches, and an Anglo-Indian accent,” said Weinberg of his elder colleague. “To me, he looked like a character in a movie about the Raj.”

The pair hit it off, and Weinberg was glad to join Salam at Imperial in 1961 as a visiting professor. As a collaborator, Weinberg’s calculated style was complementary to Salam’s flamboyance. “He was always bursting into our office to expound some new proposition,” wrote an Imperial colleague of the energetic Pakistani. Salam “loved to give names to expressions or equations — some of them risqué— and then tried to get them past the [journal] editor.”

“A little more effervescent than I was,” is how Weinberg described his friend to the Forward. “One day, he told me there was one thing he held against the Jews. I was worried what he’d say. He said, ‘The prohibition against eating pork, which you passed down to the Muslims. But every Jew I know eats the stuff.’… That kind of humor lubricated our friendship.”