In openDemocracy, Ehsan Masood looks at the spread of English language scientific terms and what it may mean for linguistic and cultural diversity.

The issue of language depletion or (at the extreme) language loss is far from abstract. Unesco’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, for example, tells us that half of the world’s approximately 7,000 spoken languages are endangered to varying degrees. 5,000 of the total number of languages are spoken by groups comprising fewer than 100,000 people; 1,500 have fewer than 1,000 (mostly elderly) speakers.

Should that be a problem for science? There are, after all, many who argue that science is a universal way of understanding the world – and that the answers to questions such as “what is a gene?”, “why is our climate changing?”, and “is the universe expanding?” will not be any different if the person trying to answer the question speaks Swahili rather than English or French as a first language.

It may be true that the search for answers to asking some of life’s big questions can in principle be conducted through the medium of any language. But there are many ways in which the existence of multiple languages (each one intrinsically rich and world-encompassing on its own terms) makes this search – and an exploration of its practical, social and scientific subsets – more enlightening.

Emmanuel over at A Fistful of Euros has some insights into the protests in France and its tormented oscillations between command and consenus as ways of running a society.

[R]egardless of whether the CPE [Contrat première embauche, the propose reform] is good idea, economically speaking, it is fair to say that Villepin’s governing method has done a great deal to heighten the crisis.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the French parliament is inherently weak: when the government really wants a law to be passed, it always gets its way. This is due in no small part to the fact that the French constitution gives the government various procedural tools to discipline rebel MPs. The most famous and effective of them is the so-called 49.3 (named after the third paragraph of the 49th article of the constitution), which confronts MPs with a stark choice: either let the bill be adopted without a vote or vote to overthrow the government.

Theoretically, that could mean that painful reforms would be easier to implement in France than in other countries. And such procedural tools are of course quite handy when you’re trying to pass a budget without a parliamentary majority. Practically, however, it often creates a perverse set of incentives: why bother trying to build support for your bill if you are 99% sure that the law will be adopted no matter what? The problem, of course, is that snubbing the trade unions and the political parties is a sure-fire way to trigger a direct confrontation between the government and the famed French street.

Tim Cornwell in The Scotsman:

The artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who devoted decades of his life to a living work of art, his garden at Little Sparta, has died.

The “concrete poet”, whose work often featured inscriptions sculpted on walls or floors, died peacefully at the age of 80 in an Edinburgh nursing home after a long illness.

The director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Richard Calvocoressi, yesterday called him “the most original artist to have worked in Scotland in the last 50 years”.

Little Sparta, the garden that Finlay carved out of six acres on the edge of the Pentlands, he said, “is known all over the world and will remain his lasting monument”.

The director of the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh, Professor Stephen Blackmore, said: “Scotland has lost a unique and inspirational gardener and a truly brilliant man.”

More here.  [Thanks to Alta L. Price.]

It has been a few months since the last Crooked Timber seminar. The new one on Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, which includes a response by Mooney, is well worth a read.

Political conflict over scientific issues has probably never been as sharp as at present. Issues like global warming and stem-cell research, that came to prominence in the 1990s are being fiercely debated. At the same time, questions that had, apparently, been resolved long ago, like evolution or the US ban on agricultural use of DDT, are being refought. A striking feature of these debates is that, in nearly all cases (the one big exception being GM foods) the fight lines up the political Right, and particularly the US Republican Party on one side, and the majority of scientists and scientific organisations on the other. Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science is, therefore, a timely contribution to the debate, and we are happy to host a seminar to discuss it, and thank Chris for agreeing to take part.

In addition to contributions from five members of CT, we’re very pleased to have two guests participating in the debate. Tim Lambert has been an active participant in the blogospheric version of some of the debates discussed by Chris. Tim, like the CT participants, broadly endorses Chris’s argument, though with some disagreement on analytical points and questions of emphasis and presentation. To broaden the debate, Steve Fuller was invited to take part in the seminar, and kindly agreed, knowing that he would be very much in the minority.

Also in Sign and Sight, Hans Magnus Enzensberger on radical losers (translated from the origin in Der Spiegel).

In a chaotic, unfathomable process, the cohorts of the inferior, the defeated, the victims separate out. The loser may accept his fate and resign himself; the victim may demand satisfaction; the defeated may begin preparing for the next round. But the radical loser isolates himself, becomes invisible, guards his delusion, saves his energy, and waits for his hour to come.

Those who content themselves with the objective, material criteria, the indices of the economists and the devastating findings of the empiricists, will understand nothing of the true drama of the radical loser. What others think of him – be they rivals or brothers, experts or neighbours, schoolmates, bosses, friends or foes – is not sufficient motivation. The radical loser himself must take an active part, he must tell himself: I am a loser and nothing but a loser. As long as he is not convinced of this, life may treat him badly, he may be poor and powerless, he may know misery and defeat, but he will not become a radical loser until he adopts the judgement of those who consider themselves winners as his own.

Since before the attack on the World Trade Center, political scientists, sociologists and psychologists have been searching in vain for a reliable pattern. Neither poverty nor the experience of political repression alone seem to provide a satisfactory explanation for why young people actively seek out death in a grand bloody finale and aim to take as many people with them as possible. Is there a phenotype that displays the same characteristics down the ages and across all classes and cultures?

No one pays any mind to the radical loser if they do not have to. And the feeling is mutual. As long as he is alone – and he is very much alone – he does not strike out. He appears unobtrusive, silent: a sleeper.

Andre Glucksmann argues that the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed and Holocaust denial and not equivalent, translated in Sign and Sight (originally published in French in Le Monde and in German in Perlentaucher).

Why are jokes about Muhammad permitted, but not those about the genocide of the Jews? This was the rallying call of fundamentalists before they initiated a competition for Auschwitz cartoons. Fair’s fair: either everything should be allowed in the name of the freedom of expression, or we should censor that which shocks both parties. Many people who defend the right to caricature feel trapped. Will they publish drawings about the gas chambers in the name of freedom of expression?

Offence for offence? Infringement for infringement? Can the negation of Auschwitz be put on a par with the desecration of Muhammad? This is where two philosophies clash. The one says yes, these are equivalent “beliefs” which have been equally scorned. There is no difference between factual truth and professed faith; the conviction that the genocide took place and the certitude that Muhammad was illuminated by Archangel Gabriel are on a par. The others say no, the reality of the death camps is a matter of historical fact, whereas the sacredness of the prophets is a matter of personal belief.

This distinction between fact and belief is at the heart of Western thought. Aristotle distinguished between indicative discourse on the one hand, which could be used to reach an affirmation or a negation, and prayer on the other.

In The New York Times, the U.S. government tries an interesting experiment in distributed problem solving, where the probelm may be how to salvage the principal justifications for war and save face.

American intelligence agencies and presidential commissions long ago concluded that Saddam Hussein had no unconventional weapons and no substantive ties to Al Qaeda before the 2003 invasion.

But now, an unusual experiment in public access is giving anyone with a computer a chance to play intelligence analyst and second-guess the government.

Under pressure from Congressional Republicans, the director of national intelligence has begun a yearlong process of posting on the Web 48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops.

Less than two weeks into the project, and with only 600 out of possibly a million documents and video and audio files posted, some conservative bloggers are already asserting that the material undermines the official view.

From Nature:

Does the prospect of public speaking make you panic? Do you run for the hills at the mere mention of spiders? Help could be at hand: researchers have come up with a way to ease the crippling symptoms of phobia. The treatment, developed by a Swiss-led research team, could one day help sufferers to face their fear simply by popping a pill before facing a stressful situation. The researchers hope that it may even have permanent effects, by helping phobics deal with the daunting prospect of undergoing therapy in which they come face to face with their fears.

The remedy contains a human hormone called cortisol, which the body produces naturally in times of stress or fear to help subdue the panic response. Previous studies have shown that increased levels of cortisol help us to blank out painful memories and emotions, allowing us to deal more effectively with stressful situations.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed “neuro-chips” in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together. The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders, or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons. To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size.

They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive. “They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip,” said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy.

More here.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

The past few weeks have been rife with accusations of closure denied. The families of Slobodan Milosevic’s tens of thousands of victims were ostensibly denied closure when he died before the conclusion of his war-crimes tribunal. Decisions over where to try exiled Liberian ruler Charles Taylor turn largely on how to afford closure to his victims. And the families of those killed in the 9/11 attacks despaired that government misconduct had ended not only the prosecution of Zacharias Moussaoui but also their one chance at closure. “I felt like my heart had been ripped out,” said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died in the attack on the Pentagon. “I felt like my husband had been killed again.”

The Moussaoui death-penalty trial has been touted by the government as a way to bring resolution to bereft families. Hundreds watch the proceedings on remote, closed-circuit televisions. Tens will testify about their losses. This will be their “day in court.” Since John Ashcroft announced in 2002 that he’d seek the death penalty for Moussaoui to “carry out justice,” the assumption has been that justice demands an execution. Ashcroft said something similar in 2001 when he decided that family members of the Oklahoma City bombing victims could witness the execution of Timothy McVeigh on closed-circuit television, insisting it would “meet their need for closure.”

Why? What’s the empirical basis for the government assumption that all, or even most, victims of terrible tragedy will find “closure” through protracted trials and executions?

More here.

“New research finds egregious errors in the reporting of medical studies.”

Britt Peterson in Seed Magazine:

Watched the nightly local newscast much in the past few years? Perhaps you’ve heard that lemon juice can be used as a substitute for HIV medications, or that exercise can actually cause cancer. If your child has something caught in his throat, doctors recommend that you shove your fingers down their gullet to get it out. Oh, and be very sure not to perform self-examinations for breast cancer—unless you want to, in which case, doctors say: Go right ahead.

According to a study in the March issue of the American Journal of Managed Care, these often flat-out wrong and occasionally harmful stories were all broadcast under the guise of scientific fact on local television news programs.

More here.  And for other dangerous effects of local news, see also Robin Varghese’s take here.

From the BBC:

Polish author Stanislaw Lem, most famous for science fiction works including Solaris, has died aged 84, after suffering from heart disease.

He sold more than 27 million copies of his works, translated into about 40 languages, and a number were filmed.

His 1961 novel Solaris was made into a movie by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1971 and again by American Steven Soderbergh in 2002.

Soderbergh’s version starred George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.

Lem was born in 1921 in Lviv in Ukraine and studied medicine there before World War II. He moved to Krakow in 1946.

More here.

Atul Gawande in the New England Journal of Medicine:

On February 14, 2006, a U.S. District Court issued an unprecedented ruling concerning the California execution by lethal injection of murderer Michael Morales. The ruling ordered that the state have a physician, specifically an anesthesiologist, personally supervise the execution, or else drastically change the standard protocol for lethal injections.¹ Under the protocol, the anesthetic sodium thiopental is given at massive doses that are expected to stop breathing and extinguish consciousness within one minute after administration; then the paralytic agent pancuronium is given, followed by a fatal dose of potassium chloride.

The judge found, however, that evidence from execution logs showed that six of the last eight prisoners executed in California had not stopped breathing before technicians gave the paralytic agent, raising a serious possibility that prisoners experienced suffocation from the paralytic, a feeling much like being buried alive, and felt intense pain from the potassium bolus. This experience would be unacceptable under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. So the judge ordered the state to have an anesthesiologist present in the death chamber to determine when the prisoner was unconscious enough for the second and third injections to be given — or to perform the execution with sodium thiopental alone.

The California Medical Association, the American Medical Association (AMA), and the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) immediately and loudly opposed such physician participation as a clear violation of medical ethics codes. “Physicians are healers, not executioners,” the ASA’s president told reporters.

More here.  [Thanks to Michael Blim.]

Richard Monge.

See more of the garden here.

I belong to a generation who felt, very early on, that anti-Americanism in Europe always had a connection to fascism. Now that does not prevent me from seeing, or at least trying to see, the America of today as it is. Nor from talking to my American friends about everything in America that is unworthy of this idea that I will never weary of contrasting with antagonistic ideas that the anti-Americans hold. I speak to them of their atrocious prisons. I speak to them of their absurd and deadly malls. Of their dubious gun fairs. I talk to them about the death penalty, unacceptable in a large democracy. I speak to them about Guantanamo, where I had a chance to work for a few days and which I left convinced was, though certainly not the gulag, nevertheless a disgrace. I speak to them, you’re right, of this ignoble debate on the conditions in which the use of torture could be justified. I speak to them about the massacre of the Indians and the fact that a gaping wound will remain in the flank of the nation until a real place of mourning and remembrance, a sort of Yad Vashem of the suffering of the first inhabitants of the country, is dedicated to them. I even talk to them about Mount Rushmore, this monument that is so emblematic of American democracy and about which I would nevertheless say: 1) it seems placed there as a colossal provocation, on a site that, for the Indian communities, was one of the most sacred in the country; 2) the sculptor of these icons is a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who apparently never renounced the ideas of his youth; 3) that it is called “Rushmore” after a filthy lawyer, a thief, employed by the great gold seekers and entrusted with finding legal ways to expropriate Indian landowners of their land at the cheapest cost. But all right. The little detail that changes everything and that I am grateful you have seen is that all of this proceeds from this fundamental love of America and the American people. I think that one cannot criticize America unless one is animated by a sincere love of its people and its Idea.

more from Bomb here.

Clarity, elegance, austerity, grace – you would hardly think these qualities went with brash and even eye-popping colour but so it is with the painting of Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly is a pioneer of American abstraction, a fabled figure, an early minimalist. He will be 83 this year. While contemporaries such as Ad Reinhardt, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin are all long gone he is still avidly picking over the potential of a few shapes and a handful of hues in a small town just far enough from New York to discourage predatory visits from the art world. He could almost be an advertisement for the benefits of peace and hard work.

Peace is certainly the characteristic atmosphere of his shows. Visitors slow down, drop their voices. That this should be the case when the colours are so full-volume – yellow, red, acid green – is part of the communal pleasure of his art;

more from The Observer here.

“Prove you are alive. Prove it.” In Atomik Aztex, Sesshu Foster takes a deep breath and conjures a loopy, violent multiverse in which “78 rpm realities” spin one after the other, for a monstrously comic opera in which life and death, glory and degradation, possible pasts and feverish futures collide on cue. Call it Slaughterhouse Jive: narrator Zenzontli is a powerful Aztec warrior attacking the Nazis at Stalingrad in 1942—or a killing floor drudge at an East L.A. meat factory, hallucinating his way out of history to the aroma of naked lunch.

In this delirious first novel—part Mumbo Jumbo, part The Man in the High Castle—poet Foster has the “proper energy vibe” to make the whole thing fly. He Herrimaniacally eschews the hard c in favor of k (“Wake that man up there, I have something kool to say”), unleashes Beat-like stretches of indentless, incantatory prose, and chocks his text with W. B. Yeats and penis-enlargement ads.

more from The Believer here.

From Edge:

The toughest ticket in London’s West End last week wasn’t for a new mega-hit musical from Cameron Mackintosh, or a new play by Tom Stoppard. The people who flocked to The Old Theatre were greeted by famed British radio and television presenter Melvyn Bragg (“Start the Week”) with the following opening words:

“They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

The words are from The Selfish Gene, by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. And the evening was a celebration of the thirty year anniversary of the publication of his classic book. As I was unable to attend, I asked Helena Cronin, the founder and director of Darwin@LSE, (and the author of The Ant and the Peacock), to guest edit this special edition of Edge, and she has kindly provided us with the complete audio of the event as well supervising the editing of the transcribed text. Edge is extremely grateful to her for her efforts.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Back when Erica Jong was a lush literary Lolita penning the It novel, she had a certain somethin’ somethin’ going on. She had a way with words: “Fear of Flying,” her feminist manifesto, sold 18 million copies worldwide. And she had a way with men: four husbands and dalliances with other women’s husbands. (Martha Stewart is allegedly still ticked.) Back then, Jong has boasted, she smelled of sex. Pheromones-a-go-go. But with time comes both change and regrets, and, well, the Italians, they don’t stalk her through the streets of Venice anymore, fingers grasping at ripe rump flesh. As Jong, who turns 64 today, sees it, this is a blessing:

“The zipless [romp] could not interest me less,” says Jong, who coined the catchphrase back in 1973. But mature sex, committed sex, with all its zippered encumbrances, interests her plenty. She’s been married to husband No. 4, divorce lawyer Ken Burrows, for 17 years, and the days spent shagging married men, unmarried men, way older men, way younger men — not to mention the occasional tryst with a girlfriend — have given way to years of contented monogamy.

More here.

UPDATE 03/26/06: Polls for the Koufax Awards close today. Please vote now!

Of the more than 300 semi-finalists each in the Best Group Blog and the Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition categories, 3 Quarks Daily has made it into the top 10 finalists in each, thanks to your earlier votes! If all our readers vote for us one more time, we can actually win this, we think, and that would get us some needed attention. The competition is very tough this time, and we need every vote!

So, I must ask you to vote for us AGAIN, one last time, by sending an email to [email protected] with the word “Koufax” in the subject line, and in the body of the email, put the following line:

I vote for 3 Quarks Daily for Best Group Blog AND Blog Most Deserving of Wider Attention.

Please just do it NOW, as the voting is not open for long. Thanks a million!