From Nature:

An Inconvenient Truth, a feature film starring former vice-president Al Gore as Al Gore giving his PowerPoint presentation on climate change, opens in New York and Los Angeles on 24 May and elsewhere throughout the summer. [email protected] tackles the big questions surrounding this much talked-about film.

Climate-change scientists who have seen it say that the main thrust of the presentation is correct, although they do disagree with details here and there. Some of his more melodramatic moments might make those used to the cautious language of scientific papers a bit uncomfortable. The wretched chaos in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina gets a lot of screen time, for example. Most climate scientists are very scrupulous about explaining that individual hurricanes can never be said to be ’caused’ by global warming, although climate change may tend to increase storm numbers or severity. Gore never actually makes a causal link, but a lay viewer could easily infer it.

More here.

Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books:

On April 5, 2006, a New Jersey jury found that Merck’s arthritis drug Vioxx caused John McDarby, a seventy-seven-year-old retired insurance agent, to suffer the heart attack that left him debilitated in 2004. (The drug was not blamed for the heart attack of a second plaintiff in the same case.) The jury also found Merck guilty of consumer fraud for not warning doctors and the public of the drug’s cardiovascular risks. McDarby and his wife were awarded $4.5 million, plus another $9 million in punitive damages because the company was found to have misled the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Merck now faces about ten thousand similar lawsuits, and has vowed to fight every one of them. So far, there have been verdicts in four cases—two for Merck and two against (the McDarby case and an earlier one in Texas, in which the plaintiff was awarded $253.5 million, which under Texas law must be cut to $26.1 million).^[1] If there are more losses, and the chances are there will be, Merck, despite its defiant talk, may ultimately have to try to reach a settlement instead of fighting each case.^[2]

The defeat was not just a loss for Merck, but for the industry as a whole, which has seen its reputation plummet in the past few years. Polls show that among American businesses, the pharmaceutical industry now ranks near the bottom in public approval—above tobacco and oil companies, but well below airlines and banks and even insurance companies. This situation contrasts sharply with the generally high regard in which the industry was held just a few years ago.

More here.

Michael Hochman in Science:

Most organisms can tell the difference between night and day simply by taking a look outside. But some may rely on more subtle clues. A few years ago, scientists discovered that corn plants release a different set of chemicals into the air in the morning and evening. Might the M. separate caterpillars, which live on corn plants throughout Asia, use these odors to plan their schedules?

A group of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan decided to test the theory by collecting gas from the plants during the day and at night. They then exposed one set of caterpillar larvae to the daytime fumes and another set to the evening fumes and observed the larvae for several hours. The creatures were almost 50% more likely to go into hiding–which they typically do during the daytime–after being exposed to the “day” fumes than they were when exposed to the “night” fumes. Night fumes made the caterpillars come out of hiding to feed on leaves, their typical evening activity. Surprisingly, changing the lighting conditions had no effect on the caterpillar behavior, indicating that the insects use plant scent alone as an alarm clock, says study co-author Junji Takabayashi.

More here.

From the Agha Khan Development Network:

An opinion poll reported recently that what American graduates want as their graduation speaker more than anyone is “someone they could relate to”. But that test, says the poll, showed the most popular university speaker in recent years was the Sesame street character, Kermit the Frog. I found it a bit intimidating to wonder just where the Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims would rank on the “relating” scale in comparison to Kermit the Frog.

Ceremonies of the sort we observe today are valuable because they help us to bridge the past and the future – to see ourselves as players in larger narratives. This School’s narrative is now sixty years old – embracing the whole of the postwar period. In that time you have dramatically broadened both the communities you serve and the programs through which you serve them.

Your history reflects a continuing conviction that the challenges of our times are fundamentally global ones – calling both for multi-disciplinary and multi-national responses.

Even as SIPA marks its 60th anniversary, I am approaching an anniversary of my own – the 50th anniversary next year of my role as Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims.

While I was educated in the West, my perspective over these fifty years has been profoundly shaped by the countries of South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where the Ismaili people live and where they are largely concentrated. For five decades, that has been my world – my virtually permanent preoccupation. And it is out of that experience that I speak today.

For the developing world, the past half-century has been a time of recurring hope and frequent disappointment. Great waves of change have washed over the landscape – from the crumbling of colonial hegemonies in mid century to the recent collapse of communist empires. But too often, what rushed in to replace the old order were empty hopes—not only the false allure of state socialism, non-alignment, and single-party rule, but also the false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism.

More here.  [Thanks to Atiya B. Khan.]

Deyan Sudjic considers the ethics of architecture in light of Rem Koolhaas’ design of Central China Television’s new headquarters in Beijing, in Frieze.com.

[W]hen Koolhaas had the shrewdness to stay out of the race to secure New York’s Ground Zero master-plan commission but decided instead to take his chances in the competition to design the new headquarters of Central China Television (CCTV) in Beijing, he talked about the emptiness of American values, contrasting them unfavourably with the energy of Asia.

Asked about the ethical implications of the CCTV project, Koolhaas’ first response was to suggest that China’s system is changing so fast that by the time his building is completed CCTV will have been privatized, and China will have given up repression as a routine political tool. It’s unlikely that Mies van der Rohe would have had a very sympathetic hearing if he had won the 1933 competition for the Reichsbank in Berlin and come up with the same kind of arguments about the bright future promised by the imminent economic transformation of Hitler’s Germany. More recently Koolhaas has taken a more overtly political line: ‘What attracts me about China is that there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost no other body that we know of today could ever afford or contemplate. Everywhere else, and particularly in architecture, money is everything now. So that is blatantly not a good situation as it leads to compromises of quality. Money is a less fundamental tenet of their ideology.’ So there.

Lindsay Beyerstein’s recent posts on aesthetics and politics/ethics are also worth reading.

Via Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, an interesting clip from the movie Žižek!

Sean’s own response to the movie is worth reading.

The movie opens with a Žižek monologue on the origin of the universe and the meaning of life. We can talk all we like, he says, about love and meaning and so on, but that’s not what is real. The universe is “monstrous” (one of his favorite words), a mere accident. “It means something went terribly wrong,” as you can hear him say through a distinctive lisp in this clip from the movie. He even invokes quantum fluctuations, proclaiming that the universe arose as a “cosmic catastrophe” out of nothing.

I naturally cringed a little at the mention of quantum mechanics, but his description ultimately got it right. Our universe probably did originate as a quantum fluctuation, either “from nothing” or within a pre-existing background spacetime. Mostly, to be honest, I was just jealous. As a philosopher and cultural critic, Žižek gets not only to bandy about bits of quantum cosmology, but is permitted (even encouraged) to connect them to questions of love and meaning and so on. As professional physicists, we’re not allowed to talk about those questions — referees at the Physical Review would not approve. But it’s worth interrogating this intellectual leap, from the accidental birth of the universe to the richness of meaning we see around us. How did we get there from here, and why?

C. Claiborne Ray in the New York Times:

Some such pictures do show stars, and NASA offers a Web link to one that does here.

For the most part, however, pictures taken by astronauts are in the nature of snapshots, intended to capture some well-lighted object in the foreground, like Earth or another astronaut.

They employ neither the exposure time nor the film speed that would capture the faint light emitted by stars, which are still distant even from a foothold in space.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an article about the origin of species–or rather, blocking the origin of species. The evolution of a new species can be a drawn out process, taking thousands or millions of years. First populations begin to diverge from each other. Later, those populations may become divided by significant reproductive barriers. Even after those populations have evolved into separate species, they may still be able to produce hybrids in the right conditions. In some cases, those hybrids may remain rare and the two species will remain intact. In other cases, the species may collapse back on each other.

The article looks at two animals in which speciation appears to be going in reverse. One is three-spined sticklebacks, which have evolved into two easily distinguished different species in 11,000 years in six separate lakes in Canada. (The papers are here and here.) In one lake, an introduced crayfish appears to be driving the two species into a single hybrid swarm.

The other example is Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos (paper here). The medium ground finch has, on some islands, diverged into two forms, one with a big beak and one with a small one. But where they have come into contact with humans, they are blurring back into a single spectrum of beaks. Hybrids with average size beaks appear to be thriving because they can eat rice and other foods left by humans.

More here.

Gautam Bhatia in the NY TImes Magazine:

One evening a few years ago, I found myself on the road that heads south out of Delhi, in the city’s fastest-developing suburb: Qutab Enclave. The area along the road was one big construction site. Many new structures sat between piles of rubble, and workers milled around concrete mixers on brown hot ground, half dug, half built. Pigs and stray dogs strolled near new plate-glass outlets for Reebok, Benetton and Levi’s.

As the head of a small architecture practice in Delhi, I had just made a routine visit to the site of a house under construction nearby when I decided to take a look at the newly-erected headquarters of a leading software company. This was one of the first so-called e-buildings in India — what its makers described as intelligent, user-friendly architecture. In my own practice, I try to conform to the ideals of hand craft, low cost and no maintenance, and having just examined the hand-applied mud plaster of the house I was working on, the idea of a peek into a high-tech extreme machine seemed all the more intriguing.

More here.

Nicholas Ostler review’s the book by David Crystal, in the New Statesman:

David Crystal is the prophet par excellence of the English language. With this book he has set his sights high, aiming not to write a history of a language (as he did in The Stories of English), nor a synopsis of worldwide languages (as in his monumental Cambridge Encyclo-paedia of Language), but to show, in a single volume, how language works.

The task is not a small one. Asking how something works implies that it can be revealingly viewed as a mechanism – which is why it makes sense to ask how a clock works but not, say, a rose or a grasshopper. With language, there is simply too much going on for there to be a single answer. So Crystal is forced to jump from one thing to another, with the result that the thing never quite forms into a workable whole. Still, he is in good company in this respect: Noam Chomsky has aimed all his life to characterise the properties of language – the “abstract organ” that develops in us all – but in practice has mostly confined himself to the mechanism of sentence structure.

Crystal casts an engaging eye over the linguistic horizon, giving us the fruits of others’ studies while building up an overarching framework into which most language questions fit. He wants to provide the interested non-expert with an outline of every major aspect of language as linguists understand it – rather as he might, say, in the course of a railway journey from London to Edinburgh.

More here.

In the recurring dream
my mother stands
in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
she is wearing an owl’s face
and makes barking noises.
Her minatory finger points.
I pass through the cardboard doorway
askew in the field
and peer down a well
where an albino walrus huffs.
He has the gentlest eyes.
If the dirt keeps sifting in,
staining the water yellow,
why should I be blamed?
Never try to explain.
That single Model A
sputtering up the grade
unfurled a highway behind
where the tanks maneuver,
revolving their turrets.
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
Where is my testing-tree?
Give me back my stones!

from, The Testing-Tree

There has been much debate over Dan Brown’s novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.” With that one word, “renowned,” Brown proves that he hails from the school of elbow-joggers—nervy, worrisome authors who can’t stop shoving us along with jabs of information and opinion that we don’t yet require. (Buried far below this tic is an author’s fear that his command of basic, unadorned English will not do the job; in the case of Brown, he’s right.) You could dismiss that first stumble as a blip, but consider this, discovered on a random skim through the book: “Prominent New York editor Jonas Faukman tugged nervously at his goatee.” What is more, he does so over “a half-eaten power lunch,” one of the saddest phrases I have ever heard.

more from The New Yorker here.

“Every song is a cry for love,” crooned Ireland’s Brian Kennedy during Saturday night’s 51st Eurovision Song Contest. He obviously hadn’t heard Lordi, the Finnish horror rock sensation which beat him and acts from 21 other countries to clinch the most emphatic ever victory in the annual festival of kitsch pop.

Dressed as bloodthirsty orcs and warning Europe to “get ready to get scared” the rockers from Arctic Lapland took the stage as Eurovision outsiders and left as winners who had taken the contest to what Terry Wogan described as a new level of foolishness with their song Hard Rock Hallelujah.

more from the Guardian Unlimited here.

Late 1857. George Eliot prepares her assault on the novel. The form is mature, and she is mature—approaching forty. The pen feels as natural in her hand as a fork, yet, despite the power and the pleasure she draws from wielding it, this supreme literary form is forbidding. An intellectual, unquestionably, but an artist? George Henry Lewes, the man with whom she shares her life (and whose undivorced status has caused much of society to close its doors to the couple—doors that will swing open again when she is famous), is encouraging her: The three increasingly ambitious stories she has turned out as Scenes of Clerical Life have stilled any doubts as to her flair for drama and dialogue. A delighted public is snapping up the book. Dickens has written to the mysterious author: “The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of”; as for her pseudonym, “I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman.” Clever man. Now, she tells her publisher, she seeks a “large canvas.” She has in mind an incident her Methodist aunt recounted to her two decades earlier, of “how she had visited a condemned criminal,—a very ignorant girl, who had murdered her child and refused to confess; how she had stayed with her praying through the night, and how the poor creature at last broke out into tears, and confessed her crime.” She sets the action at the turn of the century, in the north central England of her pious girlhood, researching the customs, the agriculture, the botany of the region; she reads Robert Southey’s The Life of Wesley, taking diligent notes on Methodism. Then she writes rapidly and confidently—the greatest and most harrowing section, as she will later relate, goes even faster than the rest—finishing the book in just over a year. Adam Bede goes on sale in February 1859 and is not only a tremendous success (the most popular of Eliot’s novels during her lifetime) but something more, something every first novelist aspires to (preposterously, crazily, but why else break your heart locking yourself away for years on such a dubious labor?): one of the glories of the form.

more from Bookforum here.

From Scientific American:

An architectural marvel when it opened 11 years ago, the new Denver International Airport’s high-tech jewel was to be its automated baggage handler. It would autonomously route luggage around 26 miles of conveyors for rapid, seamless delivery to planes and passengers. But software problems dogged the system, delaying the airport’s opening by 16 months and adding hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns. Despite years of tweaking, it never ran reliably. Last summer airport managers finally pulled the plug–reverting to traditional manually loaded baggage carts and tugs with human drivers. The mechanized handler’s designer, BAE Automated Systems, was liquidated, and United Airlines, its principal user, slipped into bankruptcy, in part because of the mess.

Such massive failures occur because crucial design flaws are discovered too late. Only after programmers began building the code–the instructions a computer uses to execute a program–do they discover the inadequacy of their designs. Now a new generation of software design tools is emerging. Their analysis engines are similar in principle to tools that engineers increasingly use to check computer hardware designs.

More here.

From Nature:

It freshens breath, protects teeth and even, if you believe the commercials, makes you immensely popular. But Finnish researchers are hoping that chewing gum could soon pull off an even more ambitious trick: helping to stave off cancer. They have made a gum containing a compound that mops up a chemical called acetaldehyde, which has been linked to cancers of the mouth, oesophagus and stomach. The active ingredient, called cysteine, is slowly released through chewing the gum.

The anti-cancer chew could help those most at risk, such as smokers and heavy drinkers, suggests Mikko Salaspuro of the University of Helsinki, who developed the idea with his colleague Martti Marvola. Smoking and drinking are linked to up to 80% of these cancers in developed countries. Smoke and alcohol both raise the levels of acetaldehyde in the mouth and upper digestive tract. Cysteine, a building block of proteins, reacts with the compound to take it out of harm’s way.

More here.

Alex Katz. Beach Sandals, 1987. Aquatint, spitbite.

More on this master American painter here and here.

More images of his work.

Carl Zimmer in his always excellent blog, The Loom:

Nothing gets the blood boiling like a manimal. For many people, the idea of breaching the human species barrier–to mingle our biology with that of an animal–seems like a supreme affront to the moral order. In his January state of the union address, President Bush called for a ban on “creating human-animal hybrids.”

These so-called chimeras, according to their opponents, devalue humanity by breaching our species barrier. “Human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale,” Bush declared. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas expanded on this sentiment in his Human Chimera Prohibition Bill of 2005. Chimeras, according to the bill, “blur the lines between human and animal.” They must be banned because “respect for human dignity and the integrity of the human species may be threatened by chimeras.”

Some opponents cite the Bible as proof that chimeras are wrong–in particular, I Corinthians 15:39: “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.” Others rely on their own sense of disgust as a reliable guide to the wrongness of chimeras. “When we start to blend the edges of things, we’re uneasy,” explains Grant Hurlburt, a psychiatrist and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. “That’s why chimeric creatures are monsters in mythology in the first place.”

So let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that a nefarious plot to create human-ape hybrids was discovered in some distant country.

More here.

From the New York Review of Books:

At the beginning of Philip Roth’s 1979 novella The Ghost Writer, the twenty-three-year-old narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, tremulously approaches the secluded New England home of a famous but reclusive Jewish writer, E.I. Lonoff. Of this Lonoff we are told that he has long ago forsaken his urban, immigrant roots—the cultural soil from which, we are meant to understand, his vaguely Bashevis Singeresque fiction sprang—for “a clapboard farmhouse…at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires.” Long out of circulation, he is considered comical by New York literary people for having “lived all these years ‘in the country’—that is to say, in the goyish wilderness of birds and trees where America began and long ago had ended.” Still, young Nathan, an aspiring novelist, admires Lonoff extravagantly, not only because of “the tenacity that had kept him writing his own kind of stories all that time,” but because

having been “discovered” and popularized, he refused all awards and degrees, declined membership in all honorary institutions, granted no public interviews, and chose not to be photographed, as though to associate his face with his fiction were a ridiculous irrelevancy.

A young man’s admiration; a young man’s perhaps self-congratulatory idealization of a figure who, it is all too clear, he would like one day to be.

If, thirty years ago, readers felt safe in identifying the ingenuous, ambitious, hugely talented Newark-born Nathan Zuckerman with his creator, anyone familiar with Roth’s recent biography will find it difficult not to identify the author today with Lonoff.

More here.

Terence M. Hines in the Skeptical Inquirer:

The one question that my students always ask when I introduce the topic of alien abductions is how could anyone possibly really believe that such a thing had happened to them if they weren’t just plain barking mad. It takes a fair amount of background in memory and related subjects to understand the psychology of the alien-abduction experience. In Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Susan Clancy has masterfully combined this background information with her own important research on alien-abduction claimants. She writes with the skill of an experienced novelist telling an exciting story. Consider the opening paragraph:

“Will Andrews is an articulate, handsome forty-two-year-old. He’s a successful chiropractor, lives in a wealthy American suburb, has a strikingly attractive wife and twin boys, age eight. The only glitch in this picture of domestic bliss is that his children are not his wife’s-they are the product of an earlier infidelity. To complicate matters further, the biological mother is an extraterrestrial.”

Following that opening, it took me only a very pleasant fall afternoon to read this book from cover to cover. The title of each chapter is a question, and the first chapter is titled, “How do you wind up studying aliens?”

More here.