Hannah Hoag in Seed Magazine:

On a Tuesday night in early fall at the Montreal Science Centre’s IMAX theatre, Hervé This, a tallish man with wispy, grey hair, paces the short length of a makeshift stage with evangelical fervor. Wearing a pale grey suit and his trademark white, un-collared shirt, he holds an egg at eye level.

“Imagine you have only one egg,” he says. “It is not a question of money to cook a good egg or a bad egg. It is a question of knowledge.”

This, a physical chemist, wants to bring the scientific method to the kitchen. At his laboratory in the Collège de France in Paris, he and his students debunk dictums, test old wives tales, and pare dishes down to their barest elements before rebuilding them into new food blends and innovative cuisine.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

The United States should grant Tariq Ramadan a visa, not because he has an inalienable right to one but in the interest of the national good. The continuing effort to keep him out is a strategic mistake, and it shows a depressingly familiar failure on the part of the Administration to grasp the nature of the conflict with Islamist radicalism. It is a struggle of ideas, played out around the world, and a figure like Ramadan, who can appeal to young Muslims on the basis of both group identity and tolerance, is a valuable interlocutor. Allowing him to assume his position at Notre Dame as Luce Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding would not necessarily improve Muslim-Western understanding (interfaith dialogue is overrated, as the Pope recently demonstrated). But it would reduce the “habits of hypocrisy and meanness” that Jefferson identified as the result of legislating against thought. Barring Ramadan makes the country that claims to represent the side of freedom in this struggle appear defensive, timorous, and closed.

More here.  And see also the video Islam and the West, the second annual New Yorker Town Hall Meeting, with Omar Ahmad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mahmood Mamdani, Azar Nafisi, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, and Lawrence Wright. George Packer, moderator.

From the CBC:

People who suffer from psoriasis, a skin disorder characterized by red, itchy patches, may be more prone to heart attacks, researchers say.

The link seemed to be particularly strong among young adults with severe cases of the skin disorder, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania report in Wednesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

For example, a 30-year-old patient with mild psoriasis had a 29 per cent greater risk of having a heart attack than someone without psoriasis, dermatology professor Dr. Joel Gelfand and his colleagues concluded after adjusting for major cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure and smoking.

More here.  [For LWP.]

Deborah Netburn in the Los Angeles Times:

Linda Goldstein Knowlton and Linda Hawkins Costigan are co-producers and co-filmmakers of “The World According to Sesame Street,” a documentary about “Sesame Street” productions around the world. The film played at Sundance earlier this year and will air on PBS later this month.

“Sesame Street” has been on the air since 1969 is currently available in 120 countries. Goldstein Knowlton and Hawkins Costigan were drawn to the idea of a “Sesame Street” documentary after hearing that a female Muppet on the Egyptian version of “Sesame Street” was successfully promoting women’s literacy in the country. Interested in what other topics “Sesame Street” productions around the world were grappling with, the women spent three days researching and fund-raising before jumping on a plane to go and see for themselves.

Three years later, they put together this film that focuses on “Sesame Street” productions in Kosovo, South Africa and Bangladesh.

More here.

Mechanical translators get better, but still sound funny sometimes. In Wired:

For those of us who see every error as a potential poem or joke, every new web service or handheld gizmo claiming to do translation strikes a chill in the heart. The other day my girlfriend told me that Sony’s PlayStation Portable can now do simultaneous translation using a microphone, speech-recognition and translation software.

It seemed too good — and too bad — to be true, so I googled the rumor. Talkman, its makers Lik-Sang claim, offers “a voice-activated translation software application” capable of “pure translations” between English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. The Gamespot review of Talkman lowers expectations somewhat, though. Not only are all interactions with foreign speakers mediated through a clunky blue bird called Max, “you can ask only the questions that have been pre-recorded into the game.”

When Google threw some of its gazillion dollars into its own Google Language Tools service, garble-fans feared that the zany poetry of imperfect web translation would be a thing of the past. So far, it hasn’t turned out that way. Especially when it comes to East Asian languages, Google’s service renders results as erratic and eccentric as AltaVista’s.

Ladbrokes gives Adonis 4/1 odds, Bob Dylan 50/1 odds, and Salman Rushdie 100/1 odds to win the Nobel Prize in Literature tomorrow.

Adonis 4/1

Orhan Pamuk 5/1

Joyce Carol Oates 6/1

Jean Marie Gustav Le Clezio 7/1

Haruki Murakami 8/1

Thomas Transtromer 8/1

Inger Christensen 9/1

Amos Oz 10/1

Ko Un 10/1

Philip Roth 10/1

Ryszard Kapuscinski 10/1

In the Asia Times Online:

he next few months will be critical. At the United Nations, trade sanctions against North Korea under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter are in prospect. The jury is out as to as to whether they will be effective. Like India and Pakistan, North Korea now has a nuclear-tipped guarantee against external molestation.

At the same time, Seoul remains the easiest of targets; threats by the North against it can be used as blackmail. Other measures, including UN interception of North Korean vessels at sea – Mr Kim has tried to send Scud missiles to Yemen before – are under consideration. North Korea’s relations with its communist ally China and rival South Korea will be tested as never before. Chinese diplomacy will be critical.

Then there is the lurid prospect of Japan and South Korea announcing nuclear-weapons acquisitions of their own. New Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe may find that his flight schedule includes Beijing and Seoul far more than he imagined. Japan’s pacifist constitution may have to be revised in light of new Northeast Asian realities. Even Taiwan may be frightened or emboldened enough to consider its own nuclear insurance policy. Add to this the great unknown of Iran (likened by some to Germany rearming in the 1930s) and policymakers, strategists and journalists are assured plenty of sleepless nights, column inches and studio time in the months ahead. Iran will be watching closely to see how the UN handles Mr Kim and will draw appropriate conclusions.

Also in Slate, a look at a related and now poignant question: can Japan et nukes?

From Time:

More here.

From Science:

Flowers come in an astonishing variety of forms, but all can be classified into two basic shapes: those with radial symmetry, such as the lily, and those with bilateral symmetry, such as the orchid. Studies of fossil flowers and plant genetics have shown that radial symmetry is the ancestral condition, whereas bilateral symmetry has evolved many times independently in various plant families. Yet few researchers have looked into just why natural selection favors bilateral symmetry. Now scientists have caught the evolution of flower shape in action, and they conclude that bilateral symmetry is favored because pollinating insects prefer it.

The team, led by José Gómez of the University of Granada, Spain, studied 300 plants of the herb Erysimum mediohispanicum, which grows in the mountains of southeast Spain. In a very rare trait among plants, the herb produces both radially and bilaterally symmetrical flowers on the same plant. Gómez and his coworkers first identified the insects pollinating the flowers by observing them for a minute at a time, with a total of 2000 separate observations. The most frequent visitor, representing more than 80% of all flower visits, was the small beetle Meligethes maurus. The team then carefully measured the three-dimensional shape of the flowers using a technique called geometric morphometry.

They found a slam dunk for natural selection: Not only did the flowers with bilateral symmetry receive more visits from pollinating beetles than did those with radial symmetry, but the plants harboring them produced more seeds and more progeny plants over the course of the study.

More here.

Sure to start controversy, a new Lancet study puts Iraqi deaths related to violence since the March 2003 invasion at 600,000. (Via DeLong.) In The Wall Street Journal Online:

A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate.

The study, to be published Saturday in the British medical journal the Lancet, was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health by sending teams of Iraqi doctors across Iraq from May through July. The findings are sure to draw fire from skeptics and could color the debate over the war ahead of congressional elections next month.

The Defense Department until 2004 eschewed any effort to compute the number of Iraqi dead but this summer released a study putting the civilian casualty rate between May and August at 117 people a day. Other tabulations using different methodologies put the range of total civilian fatalities so far from about 50,000 to more than 150,000. President Bush in December said “30,000, more or less” had died in Iraq during the invasion and in the violence since.

The Johns Hopkins team conducted its study using a methodology known as “cluster sampling.” That involved randomly picking 47 clusters of households for a total 1,849 households, scattered across Iraq. Team members interviewed each household about any deaths in the family during the 40 months since the invasion, as well as in the year before the invasion. The team says it reviewed death certificates for 92% of all deaths reported. Based on those figures, it tabulated national mortality rates for various periods before and after the start of the war. The mortality rate last year was nearly four times the preinvasion rate, the study found.

(The study can be found here.)

In the Economist:

PETER YELLOWLEES, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, has been teaching about schizophrenia for 20 years, but says that he was never really able to explain to his students just how their patients suffer. So he went online, downloaded some free software and entered Second Life. This is a “metaverse” (ie, metaphysical universe), a three-dimensional world whose users, or “residents”, can create and be anything they want. Mr Yellowlees created hallucinations. A resident might walk through a virtual hospital ward, and a picture on the wall would suddenly flash the word “shitface”. The floor might fall away, leaving the person to walk on stepping stones above the clouds. An in-world television set would change from showing an actual speech by Bob Hawke, Australia’s former prime minister, into Mr Hawke shouting, “Go and kill yourself, you wretch!” A reflection in a mirror might have bleeding eyes and die.

When Mr Yellowlees invited, as part of a trial, Second Life’s public into the ward, 73% of the visitors said afterwards that it “improved [their] understanding of schizophrenia.” Mr Yellowlees then went further. For about $300 a month, he leases an island in Second Life, where he has built a clinic that looks exactly like the real one in Sacramento where many of his students practise. He gives his students “avatars”, or online personas, so they can attend his lectures inside Second Life and then experience hallucinations. “It’s so powerful that some get quite upset,” says Mr Yellowlees.

Second Life, as Mr Yellowlees illustrates, is not a game. Admittedly, some residents—there were 747,263 as of late September, and the number is growing by about 20% every month—are there just for fun. They fly over islands, meander through castles and gawk at dragons. But increasing numbers use Second Life for things that are quite serious. They form support groups for cancer survivors. They rehearse responses to earthquakes and terrorist attacks. They build Buddhist retreats and meditate.

Paul Berman seems to have started a trend. Waller Newell has a go at tracing a genealogy of contemporary political Islam to European fascism, this time connecting Ahmadinejad to Heidegger’s Nazism via Ali Shariati and Franz Fanon. (Wasn’t Fanon, not too long ago, supposed to be just a tawny immitation of Sorel? Or is he now just a third-world Rorschach for the political right?) Now if someone could work Charles Maurras into it, then we could also get the French in there. In The Weekly Standard:

A number of writers including Bernard Lewis and Paul Berman have stressed connections between al Qaeda and European ideologies of revolutionary extremism. The Iranian revolution’s connections with these ideologies are, if anything, even better documented. The key figure here is the acknowledged intellectual godfather of the Iranian revolution, Ali Shariati. To understand Ahmadinejad’s campaign to return to the purity of the revolution and why it leads him to flirt with nuclear Armageddon, it is necessary to understand Ali Shariati.

Ali Shariati (1933-1977) was an Iranian intellectual who studied comparative literature in Paris in the early 1960s and was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. He translated Sartre’s major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, into Farsi, and coauthored a translation of Fanon’s famous revolutionary tract The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre and Fanon together were responsible for revitalizing Marxism by borrowing from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of existentialism, which stressed man’s need to struggle against a purposeless bourgeois world in order to endow life with meaning through passionate commitment. By lionizing revolutionary violence as a purifying catharsis that forces us to turn our backs on the bourgeois world, Sartre and Fanon hoped to rescue the downtrodden from the seduction of Western material prosperity. Fanon was even more important because he imported from Heidegger’s philosophy a passionate commitment to the “destiny” of “the people,” the longing for the lost purity of the premodern collective that had drawn Heidegger to National Socialism.

In The New York Times:

Indian writer Kiran Desai on Tuesday succeeded where her mother failed and became the youngest woman ever to win the Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.

Desai, whose mother and fellow writer Anita was three times shortlisted for the Booker, won the 50,000 pound prize at her first attempt for her sweeping novel “The Inheritance of Loss”. She has just turned 35.

“To my mother I owe a debt so profound. This book feels as much hers as as it does mine,” Desai said after accepting her prize.

“It was written in her company and in her wisdom and kindness,” the overwhelmed author said. “I really owe her this book so enormously.”

Chairwoman of the judges Hermione Lee said: “It was a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.”

“A Collision of Prose and Politics: A prominent professor’s attack on a best-selling memoir sparks debate among Iranian scholars in the U.S.”

Richard Byrne in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Like many Americans of Iranian descent, Hamid Dabashi read an article in the April 17 issue of The New Yorker with anxious dismay.

In that article, Seymour Hersh reported that President Bush’s administration was preparing an airstrike against Iran, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.

The president himself dismissed the report as “wild speculation.” But Mr. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University who has been active in the antiwar movement since the attacks of September 11, 2001, heard a call to action.

The article prompted him to dust off an essay that he had written a few years before and publish it in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English-language newspaper Al-Ahram. His target? Not President Bush or the Pentagon, but Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington.

Ms. Nafisi’s memoir, published by Random House in 2003, blended a harrowing portrayal of the life of women in post-revolutionary Iran with a powerful personal testimony about the power of literary classics. The book found a wide audience, and its success made Ms. Nafisi a celebrity.

More here.

A cache of unpublished letters from the novelist Virginia Woolf and scores of first editions inscribed by leading writers and poets of the early 20th century has emerged in the contents of the library of Lady Ottoline Morrell, the society hostess who became one of the most flamboyant, loved and mocked associates of the Bloomsbury group.

Among the letters to be sold is one to her from Woolf. “I hate being a passive bucket,” she wrote. “In short, great men bore me to death.” Woolf wondered: “How on earth does Ottoline suck enough nourishment out of the solitary male? I was thinking of your tea parties and I thought of Stephen Spender talking about himself and of old Tom [TS] Eliot also enlarging on the same theme and then in comes shall we say Siegfried [Sassoon] and it all begins again. Now in human intercourse I like the light to strike on more angles than one. And all clever men become frozen stalactites.”

More here.

From BBC:

Sustainability is the motto of the Western Harbour (Vaestra Hamnen) project in the southern city of Malmo. There are futuristic buildings sporting massive glass windows and glinting solar panels. But turn a corner and you find a green courtyard with a little pond and some modest timber structures that remind you of Swedish villages. “I really like the diversity of houses – and they’ve made it easy here to live in a sustainable way,” says Helena Parker, who was among the first to move into the area in 2001.

A former shipyard and industrial site is being turned into a green residential area based on 100% use of renewable energy. The first phase of Western Harbour, called Bo01, now has 1,000 homes, covering 25ha (62 acres). But eventually the area will accommodate 10,000 residents and 20,000 employees and students.

More here.

From The Economist:

Since the early 1970s, the two grandest patterns of life—how species are arranged in space and how they are arranged in time—have divided their opposing camps quite neatly. Those who squabble over space disagree about why there are more species in the tropics than anywhere else. To them, the tropics are either where species are more often born (cradles of diversity) or where they tend not to die (museums of diversity). By contrast, biologists concerned with patterns in time tenaciously debate whether new species come into being in a smooth and gradual manner, or whether the history of life is actually a series of bursts of change that are interspersed with periods when nothing much happens.

Two papers just published in Science have cast light on these questions, and their findings, if not necessarily resulting in compromise, do show the value of taking leaves out of other people’s books. The “space biologists” have looked into time, namely the fossil record over the past 11m years. Meanwhile the “time biologists” have looked at the here and now and found evidence in living species for periods of rapid evolution in their genes.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Bob Woodward’s disclosure of the influence of Henry Kissinger on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy both is and is not a surprise. After all, we have known for a long time that the bungling old war criminal has his admirers within the White House. Did not the president, almost but not quite incredibly, call on him as the first chairman of the 9/11 commission? Kissinger’s initial acceptance of that honor was swiftly withdrawn after it was pointed out—first of all in this space, if I may say so—that he would have to make a full disclosure of the interests of Kissinger Associates in the Middle East. This condition was too much for him. (I added that, since he was wanted for questioning by magistrates in France, Chile, and Argentina, in connection with offenses of state terrorism, his appointment to a position of such high eminence at such a time might expose the United States to ridicule, not to say contempt.)

Then the Bush administration took the decision to appoint Paul Bremer, a former partner of Kissinger Associates, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority…

More here.

Max Hastings in the London Times:

Michael Burleigh forged a formidable reputation as a historian of Germany, and consolidated it with Earthly Powers, his study of the influence of religion upon European politics between 1789 and 1918, published last year. Sacred Causes takes the story up to the present day.

Its first half addresses in masterly fashion the relationship between the churches and the totalitarians. The later chapters are part narrative, part an outpouring of rage about the manner in which Europe over the past 40 years has abandoned itself to the worship of false idols, of which secularism, multiculturalism and indulgence of Irish republican gangsterism are among the most damaging.

Burleigh is at his best analysing the relationship between Christianity and the Nazis, about whom he knows as much as any man. Of Hitler, he writes: “There is something faintly ridiculous about the weight of learning brought to bear in the last six decades on this less than fascinating figure, a cavernous blank behind the impassioned postures.”

More here.

Jay Alexander reviews Modern Man, a film by Justin Swibel:

MODERN MAN, filmmaker Justin Swibel’s feature debut, wordlessly weaves the fractured tale of an unnamed central character trying desperately to fight the boredom of his mysterious isolation. He cleans his pool, grooms the tennis court (at least he’s not impoverished), plays on the jungle gym, and waters the garden. The meticulous documentation of these processes may turn off moviegoers with a more Pirates of the Carrebeanish attention span. No, MODERN MAN is not for those who require explosions, booming heroic music cues, and glib one-liners. Yet perhaps it is…

More here.