In the Guardian, DM Thomas remembers William Golding.

I walked into a fish-and-chip shop in Truro, about 15 years ago, and joined a queue. At the head of it was an elderly man with wild white hair and beard, wearing a grubby raincoat. I recognised William Golding. I mused about the odds against walking into a chippie and seeing a Nobel Laureate having fish and chips wrapped. He shuffled past me without recognition and I didn’t say hello. It seemed an embarrassment to do so, almost as if I’d caught him buying a top-shelf magazine.

We had something in common beside fish-and-chips, wild white hair, grubby raincoats and writing novels. I had returned to my native Cornwall in 1987, a few years later than he had done. We don’t think of Golding as Cornish, but his mother was Cornish, and he was born near Newquay. His parents had married in Truro Cathedral. I lived with my wife Denise and our son in Truro, Golding a few miles away, in the village of Perranarworthal. He’d moved back from Wiltshire, I’d heard, partly to escape from the hordes of fans and trashcan-raiders, partly because he was proud of his Cornish roots.

From The Boston Globe:

AT FIRST GLANCE, Walter Benjamin, the bespectacled, bushy mustached, deeply serious, and influential German literary critic, may not strike you as a likely drug user. Indeed, he considered drugs a “poison,” and a rather disreputable one at that. As Marcus Boon writes in his introduction to “On Hashish,” a slim English translation of Benjamin’s writings on drugs, just published by Harvard University Press, “Drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of celebration in Benjamin’s intellectual milieu” in the Berlin of the 1920s and early `30s.

And yet, surprisingly, few writers have approached the experience of intoxication with Benjamin’s earnestness, profound wonderment, and sense of purpose. Neither a recreational user nor an addict, he had a studious, deliberate, almost scholarly approach. In 1927, persuaded by some doctor friends to take part in their research, Benjamin began to dabble in a range of drugs-opium, hashish, mescaline-and recorded his experiences in a series of fragments and “protocols”: observations in Benjamin’s hand alternating with the musings of his medical pals.

In the writings collected in “On Hashish,” some composed during a drug session, others afterwards in recollection (Benjamin only published two drug-related texts in his lifetime), the often forbidding theorist appears in a playful, relaxed mode.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

In a dark alley the stealthy killer stalks her next unsuspecting victim. This isn’t the plot of a pulp comic, but an everyday occurrence in the life of a pampered urban house cat.

Get a cat’s-eye view of one pet’s nightly prowl, and find out why the activities of our feline friends are raising the hackles of some wildlife conservationists.

Video here.  (This one is for Guddi).

NOTE: All posts at 3QD related to the Aula 2006 ─ Movement event, including this one, will be collected on this page. Bookmark it to stay on top of the Aula meeting at all times for the next week.

The last keynote speaker at the Aula 2006 ─ Movement meeting in Helsinki next week is Joi Ito, who hardly needs me to introduce him. Most of you have probably at least heard his name, it is so ubiquitous on the web. Among other things, he was one of the early bloggers and Joi’s blog remains one of the most-visited in the world. As a matter of fact, Joi gave me some good advice by email about blogging in the early days of 3QD, and I am looking forward to finally meeting him face to face.

This is from Joi’s bio on Wikipedia:

Joi Ito, is a Japanese-born, American-educated, activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

Ito has received much recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains a blog, a wiki, an IRC channel and contributes to the Tokyo Metroblogging. Early on, Joi was involved in running a nightclub in Japan, bringing industrial music from Chicago (Wax Trax) and later the rave scene, including importing Anarchic Adjustment to Japan. He was an active player on the first Multi User Dungeons (MUD) at Essex University and once worked with Sega, on the Dreamcast‘s online features.

He also appears as a character in a webcomic, The Adventures of Epicenter, which was once linked to in his blog.

I am sure that others besides me must also wonder how Joi can possibly have time for everything that he does, but to his unbelievably busy schedule he has managed to add the time-drain of playing World of Warcraft! In a short article he recently published in Wired (and which I had also posted at 3QD a few days ago) he confesses that:

I started playing a year ago and have become custodian of We Know, a guild of about 250 people worldwide: medics, CEOs, bartenders, mothers, soldiers, students. We assemble in-game to mount epic six-hour raids that require some members to wake at 4 am and others to stay up all night. Outside the game, we stay in touch using online forums, a wiki, blogs, and a mailing list – plus a group voice chat, which I’ve connected to my home stereo so I can hear the guild’s banter while I’m cooking dinner. I have never been this addicted to anything before. My other hobbies are gone. My daily blogging regimen has taken a hit. And my social life revolves more and more around friends in the game.

But don’t let this fool you into thinking that Joi is any less productive than ever before. Check out some of his current activities (also listed at his Wikipedia page):

…Ito is [currently] General Manager of International Operations for Technorati, Chairman of Six Apart Japan, and also currently a member of the board of Creative Commons, Socialtext, The Metabrainz Foundation and Technorati Japan. He is the Chairman of the board of Creative Commons International. He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. In October of 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004. In April of 2005, he was named to the board of the Open Source Initiative. In August of 2005, he joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation. In 2006 he was appointed to the board [1] of WITNESS.

And as if this weren’t enough:

He is attempting, again, to educate himself and is studying at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy [2] as a Doctorate of Business Administration candidate…

There is far more one could say about Joi, but I’ll end by saying that he is endlessly surprising. For example, I recently found out that he is Timothy Leary’s godson! Check out Joi’s touching remembrance of Leary on the 10th anniversary of his death:

Timothy Leary passed away 10 years ago today. I was with him the evening before he died and I still remember his humor even in his final hour.

I met Timothy Leary in Tokyo in the summer of 1990. Tim was excited about virtual reality and had told his friend David Kubiak in Kyoto to help him track down “young Japanese kids who know about virtual reality”. I wasn’t a VR expert, but I was into computer graphics, games and the rave/club scene. I had also just opened a nightclub in Tokyo. David, who lived in Kyoto, directed Tim to me and several others in Tokyo and we hooked up with him at a bar.

I hijacked the situation. After dinner I grabbed Tim and took him on a whirlwind tour of the Tokyo club scene.

Read the rest of that post here. If you want more info on Joi, Google him and, trust me, you’ll get plenty to keep you going for quite a while. See you on Wednesday, Joi!

Rudolf A. Raff reviews Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development by Nobel-laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, in American Scientist:

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is one of the pioneers in the groundbreaking discoveries that revealed how genes regulate the development of animal embryos. For this effort she shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Eric F. Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. In Coming to Life, she provides an engaging and clear summary of what developmental biologists now understand about how embryos work.

The existence of such an apparently simple guide shows how much we have come to take for granted the explanation of development by gene regulation. However, it should be understood that what Nüsslein-Volhard describes actually represents the outcome of one of the premier intellectual triumphs of human thought—one that has been achieved within only the past two and a half decades.

Consider the profound difficulty embryonic development presents to an observer. A complex organism, such as a chick, frog, insect or human, arises in an orderly and magical way from an apparently structureless egg.

More here.

Christine Gibson at American Heritage:

No matter how widely he had been hailed as a hero 14 years before, by 1506, when he died (500 years ago today), Christopher Columbus was all washed up.

Crowds from across Spain lined the streets of Seville in 1493 to welcome him home from his first voyage to the Americas, but he already hadn’t found what he was looking for, a seaway to India’s spice-trade ports. He never would, though the search consumed the rest of his life. A little genocide here, some slavery there, several mutinies, and multiple executions of crew members later, and Columbus fell out of favor with the Spanish crown and the public. When he died he was surrounded by family and by the trappings of his substantial income. But he went to his grave with the gouging sense of injustice he couldn’t forgive and of failure he couldn’t explain.

His reputation began to sour during his second expedition.

More here.

From The New York Times:

‘Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,’ by Charles J. Shields

Here is a book about a woman who knew when to get off the train. A tomboy from Monroeville, Ala., editor of her college humor magazine, The Rammer Jammer, and law school dropout, she took it on the lam to New York, got a job, made friends and managed to write a novel that hit the best-seller lists and stayed there, won a Pulitzer, got made into a major movie and became a staple of high school English along with “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Great Gatsby.” Total sales are somewhere around 30 million, and it continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year.

She worked for years on a second novel, and then, in the mid-1980’s, on a book of nonfiction about a serial murder in Alabama, neither of which worked out to her satisfaction and so she squashed them. She made her peace with being a one-book author. Unlike her friend Truman Capote, she didn’t enjoy the limelight. So she backed away from celebrity, declined to be interviewed or be honorifically degreed and simply lived her life, sometimes in Manhattan, riding city buses, visiting museums and bookstores in her running suit and sneakers, seeing old friends, and most of the time in Monroeville, in a ranch house with her older sister Alice, a house full of books. Built-in bookshelves, floor to ceiling.

More here.

Bryan Curtis in Slate:

For decades, it was baseball that felt brainy and top-heavy—thanks to the efforts of men like George F. Will, who was forever wondering how Tony LaRussa reminded him of Tocqueville. From John Cheever to Stephen Jay Gould, baseball’s beat poets looted the game for metaphors for and clues to the national character. Those same deep thoughts are now regularly located in soccer, which seems primed to yield both grand sociopolitical theories and inchoate childhood longings.

What brought soccer to the smart set? Well, one could simply argue that soccer’s time had come. Many of the writers in question (Eggers, Foer) were in their formative years when soccer became a mandatory youth sport in America, as well as a part of the American sporting scene (a moment generally pegged at Pelé’s signing by the New York Cosmos in 1975.) “What you’re seeing now is the result of the gold rush of soccer in the 1970s, when Pelé came to America and made it cool for kids,” says David Hirshey, soccer aficionado and executive editor of HarperCollins. “Those kids have grown up to be McSweeney’s and Granta writers.”

More here.

Freeman J. Dyson reviews Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett, in the New York Review of Books:

Dennett is a philosopher. In this book he is confronting the philosophical questions arising from religion in the modern world. Why does religion exist? Why does it have such a powerful grip on people in many different cultures? Are the practical effects of religion preponderantly good or preponderantly evil? Is religion useful as a basis for public morality? What can we do to counter the spread of religious movements that we consider dangerous? Can the tools and methods of science help us to understand religion as a natural phenomenon? Dennett remarks at the beginning that he will proceed

not by answering the big questions that motivate the whole enterprise but by asking them, as carefully as I can, and pointing out what we already know about how to answer them, and showing why we need to answer them.

I am a philosopher, not a biologist or an anthropologist or a sociologist or historian or theologian. We philosophers are better at asking questions than at answering them….

Dennett practices what he preaches. He does not answer the questions, but takes four hundred pages to ask them. The book proceeds at a leisurely pace, with an easy conversational style and many digressions.

More here. There is more about Dennett’s book at 3QD here, including a link to my own review.

From The New Yorker:

At first glance, there’s nothing unusual about the refinery that Marathon Oil owns in Garyville, Louisiana. Like most refineries, it is in a small town near a port. It can refine two hundred and forty-five thousand barrels of oil a day, which is around the industry median. And the people who live near it have got used to the smell of sulfur dioxide. Indeed, the only thing that’s special about the Garyville facility is that it was opened in 1976. That makes it the last refinery ever built in the United States…

…high gas prices usually provoke one of two explanations: either they’re evidence of a conspiracy or they’re just the result of the free market at work. The good news is that there’s no conspiracy. The bad news is that there’s also no free market.

More here.

Tracy Staedter in Discovery News:

Millions of computer-generated entities that live and die by natural selection could reveal how our own culture and language evolve.

The software agents are part of a project called NEW TIES (New and Emergent World Models Through Individual, Evolutionary, and Social Learning), which draws on the expertise of five European research institutions to push computer simulation of artificial worlds further than ever before.

The joint computer project not only reproduces individual and evolutionary learning, but also social learning.

“Social learning is these guys telling each other what they learn on their own. One is learning about hot and cold and another is learning about soft and hard.”

“They exchange knowledge and save effort,” explained project coordinator Gusz Eiben, a professor of artificial intelligence at the Vrije University, Amsterdam.

Understanding gleaned from such a project could advance machine learning for a range of applications.

More here.

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post:

The frame surrounding an image of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s head, revealed to the world as proof the terrorist is dead, is bizarre. When the picture was displayed at a U.S. military news briefing, Zarqawi’s face was seen inside what appeared to be a professional photographic mat job, with a large frame, as if it were something one might preserve and hang on the wall next to other family portraits. One function of frames is to bound an image, and close down its open edges; frames delimit, both physically and by extension, metaphorically. But that was the last thing this frame was doing…

…so will this image, given a strange dignity by its prominent frame, be a defining image of the war? Not likely. Its primary function is forensic. It proves, in an age of skepticism (heightened by a three-year history of official claims about the war turning out to be false), that Zarqawi is indeed dead. But beyond that, the image has little power. Indeed, as with so many images in this war, it is loaded with the potential to backfire.

More here.

Philip E. Tetlock in Project Syndicate:

Every day, experts bombard us with their views on topics as varied as Iraqi insurgents, Bolivian coca growers, European central bankers, and North Korea’s Politburo. But how much credibility should we attach to the opinions of experts?

The sanguine view is that as long as those selling expertise compete vigorously for the attention of discriminating buyers (the mass media), market mechanisms will assure quality control. Pundits who make it into newspaper opinion pages or onto television and radio must have good track records; otherwise, they would have been weeded out.

Skeptics, however, warn that the mass media dictate the voices we hear and are less interested in reasoned debate than in catering to popular prejudices. As a result, fame could be negatively, not positively, correlated with long-run accuracy.

Until recently, no one knew who is right, because no one was keeping score. But the results of a 20-year research project now suggest that the skeptics are closer to the truth.

More here.

NOTE: All posts at 3QD related to the Aula 2006 ─ Movement event, including this one, will be collected on this page. Bookmark it to stay on top of the Aula meeting at all times for the next week.

The third keynote speech at the Aula 2006 ─ Movement public event will be given by Martin Varsavsky, a well-known Argentine/Spanish entrepeneur. Martin has a BA degree from NYU and an MA in Business Administration from Columbia University (I think that sort of education makes you at least an honorary New Yorker-for-life, Martin!). While still an undergraduate at NYU, Martin started his first business, a real estate development company based in NY. Two years later he founded a biotechnology company named Medicorp Services, which became a pioneer in AIDS testing.

[Photo from David S. Isenberg’s blog shows, from left: Joichi Ito, Aula co-founder Marko Ahtisaari, and Martin Varsavsky.]

More recently, one of Martin’s ventures (Ya.com, launched in 1999) has become Spain’s second largest Internet content company. But Martin has done a lot more than just start companies. As his bio on his website explains:

Martin Varsavsky is also President and founder of the Varsavsky Foundation, a private, independent grant-making organization dedicated to broadening access to, and improving the quality of education world-wide. It has donated funds primarily to Educ.ar (Argentina) and EducarChile (Chile) , two education portals that aim to democratize and modernize the educational systems in their respective countries. Because of his outstanding contributions to his country of origin, Varsavsky was awarded the title of Ambassador-at-Large of Argentina in 2001 up to 2005.

He is also on the Board of Trustees of the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, and is board member of the Instituto de Empresa and the Peaceworks OneVoice Foundation.

Passionate about current affairs and global issues, Martin Varsavsky has written numerous articles on business and international relations that have been published in several international publications including El Pais and Newsweek. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences around the world, such as the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos…

…he is the recipient of various honors and rewards, among them European Telecommunications Entrepreneur of the Year in 1998, ECTA´s European Entrepreneur of the Year in 1999, Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2000, and Spanish Entrepreneur of the Year by iBest in 2000.

In his spare time, Martin enjoys cycling, piloting, cooking asados and sailing.

Julie Jette of the Harvard Business School had this to say about Martin’s early confidence in a 2001 profile:

It was the roaring 1980s, and Martin Varsavsky was about to receive his MBA from Columbia University—and he still couldn’t get a job. His fruitless job search was probably the best thing that ever happened to him.

Varsavsky, the irreverent closing speaker at the “Growth Opportunities in Latin America” conference, has started six successful companies in fifteen years. Entrepreneurship is in his blood, and it became obvious during that job search.

Varsavsky said he would go to interviews only to be tripped up by the “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question. “I would say, ‘Well, as your boss.'”

Among other things, Martin currently runs FON, a company which is a provider of wireless broadband access to the internet. Ethan Zuckerman describes the enterprise on his blog thus:

My friend Martin Varsavsky, an absurdly successful serial entrepreneur, has started a new venture – FON. FON is an international company based on the idea of sharing broadband connections through wireless routers. The basic theory – if you’re willing to share your own bandwidth, you can become part of a global network of people also willing to share their connections.

You can choose to share either as “Linus” or a “Bill”. As Linus, you’re agreeing to make your bandwith available to anyone. As a Bill, you’re selling bandwidth for 5 euros for 24 hours, and you split the proceeds with FON, allowing you to become a small-scale wireless entrepeneur. If you’re part of the FON network, you get access to a “Bill” access point for free – it’s only “Aliens” – non-foneros – who pay.

The idea is that you become a fonero by sharing your bandwith at home (with FON’s paying customers) and in exchange, you get free access to wifi wherever you go. In other words, the profit comes from the users of FON who are not also donors.

There is an article in Forbes entitled “Young, Rich & Restless” about Martin which you can see here. Another “fonero” and advisor to FON is Joichi Ito, the last keynote speaker at the Aula meeting, whom I will be profiling tomorrow. Check it out then.

Jürgen Schmidhuber reviews Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd, in American Scientist:

In the 1940s, computer pioneer Konrad Zuse began to speculate that the universe might be nothing but a giant computer continually executing formal rules to compute its own evolution. He published the first paper on this radical idea in 1967, and since then it has provoked an ever-increasing response from popular culture (the film The Matrix, for example, owes a great deal to Zuse’s theories) and hard science alike.

Given this backdrop, Seth Lloyd appears to be exaggerating when he claims in his informative and entertaining new book that he “advocates a new paradigm” by postulating the universe to be a machine that processes information. However, in the book, which is titled Programming the Universe, Lloyd does somewhat distinguish himself from his predecessors by focusing on the weird world of quantum computation. He lucidly explains what quantum computation is all about, how the process of quantum entanglement seems to involve an instantaneous exchange of information between locations that can be light-years apart, and why this phenomenon unfortunately cannot be exploited to transmit information faster than light. He also describes how quantum computers would be able to solve certain problems much faster than their traditional counterparts.

More here.  And there is an interesting interview with Seth Lloyd here.

As Asad Raza anticpated in his brilliant analysis of the French Open, Federer faces Nadal in the final. This is from CNN:

Roger Federer reached the French Open for the first time when his opponent David Nalbandian of Argentina retired in Friday’s semifinal while trailing 3-6 6-4 5-2.

He will play arch rival Rafael Nadal in what could be one of the best French finals of all time.

More here.

Brendan O’Neill in Slate:

There have been three major terror attacks in the West over the past five years—9/11, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London Underground. For all the talk of a radical Islamist conspiracy to topple Western civilization, there are many differences between the men who executed these attacks. The ringleaders of 9/11 were middle-class students; the organizers of the Madrid bombings were mainly immigrants from North Africa; the 7/7 bombers were British citizens, well-liked and respected in their local communities. And interpretations of Islam also varied wildly from one terror cell to another. Mohamed Atta embraced a mystical (and pretty much made-up) version of Islam. For the Madrid attackers, Islam was a kind of comfort blanket. The men behind 7/7 were into community-based Islam, which emphasized being good and resisting a life of decadence.

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires?

More here.

In Per Contra, an interview with the musician/songwriter Deeyah.

[PC] You’ve stated that some people have called you a Hindu. In your opinion, why is it important for these critics to label you as other than your ethnic and religious identity?

It is a simple tactic of distraction. They think by using a smokescreen of deception they don’t have to deal the real issues at hand. I think it’s much easier to attempt insult or launch accusations rather than addressing what I’m saying. It’s a difficult thing for anyone to examine themselves and admit to the negative aspects of their own community. However, for people to pretend like nothing is going on and attempting to discredit anyone that speaks about any of the problems within our community is, in my opinion, only highlighting the fact that they are actually a part of the problem. My birth name is Deepika which is considered a traditional Hindu name. I was given this name as a sign of respect and gratitude to an elder Indian Hindu woman who nursed and took care of my Muslim mother while she was pregnant with me. To suggest that one has to have an Arabic or Persian name in order to qualify as a Muslim is quite ridiculous and ignorant. My mother, father and their ancestors are all Sunni Muslims. It is much easier to dismiss me and what I am saying by stripping me of my heritage in the hopes that either people will not pay any attention to what I’m saying or that I will get scared or disheartened by the treatment of these critics to where I will hopefully shut up. It’s all an attempt to silence and intimidate anyone that says anything they’re not supposed to say…

[PC] Why is it important to you to make it plain to the world that you are speaking as a Muslim woman?

Because it has become so important to some Muslim leaders and extremists to discredit me as a Muslim, I have had to justify my existence as a “Muslim artist”. I have now inadvertently become a sort of spokeswoman for a younger generation western-born Muslim women. I never really set out to do this. My heritage is something I’ve always been proud of but never forced onto people. Despite this I have never really been allowed to just be an artist and to get on with just music. My background has always become an issue (and a negative one at that) within the community.

Mary Anne Weaver in the Atlantic Monthly:

On a cold and blustery evening in December 1989, Huthaifa Azzam, the teenage son of the legendary Jordanian-Palestinian mujahideen leader Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, went to the airport in Peshawar, Pakistan, to welcome a group of young men. All were new recruits, largely from Jordan, and they had come to fight in a fratricidal civil war in neighboring Afghanistan—an outgrowth of the CIA-financed jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet occupation there.

The men were scruffy, Huthaifa mused as he greeted them, and seemed hardly in battle-ready form. Some had just been released from prison; others were professors and sheikhs. None of them would prove worth remembering—except for a relatively short, squat man named Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah.

He would later rename himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Once one of the most wanted men in the world, for whose arrest the United States offered a $25 million reward, al-Zarqawi was a notoriously enigmatic figure—a man who was everywhere yet nowhere. I went to Jordan earlier this year, three months before he was killed by a U.S. airstrike in early June, to find out who he really was, and to try to understand the role he was playing in the anti-American insurgency in Iraq.

More here.

In Outlook India, will Brahmins lose their near-monopoly on the clergy in Hinduism?

The thorn in social revolutionary Periyar E.V. Ramasamy’s heart has been removed, claims Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi. On May 23, the Tamil Development, Culture and Religious Endowments department issued Government Order (GO) No. 118 by declaring that “Hindus belonging to all castes possessing suitable qualifications and training will be appointed as priests to Hindu temples”. This was in pursuance of a 2002 Supreme Court judgement upholding the appointment of a non-Brahmin as a priest in Kerala. Though political observers see it as a symbolic gesture, the move, if translated into action, could have important repercussions for the practice of Hinduism where priesthood has traditionally been a Brahmin preserve.