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.

Heather Whipps in LiveScience.com:

Maybe she’s smiling because she found the secret to immortality.

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” widely considered the world’s most recognizable work of art, turns 500 this year. Maybe.

The sitter’s enigmatic smirk is just one of the mysteries that historians, scientists and conspiracy theorists have been debating since the artist touched his last brushstroke to the canvas.

Even the year it was painted is not known for sure. It is widely believed to have been finished in 1506, but experts say that’s no more than a good guess. Toting it with him his entire life, da Vinci likely touched it up in subsequent years.

The painting currently hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. It is set behind a wall of bulletproof glass and watched over by armed guards.

So what’s all the fuss about?

More here.

From Dawn:

RAY Kurzweil loves the future. Not the vague concept that most of us carry around — essentially a picture of a world like today’s but worse, thanks to global warming, population growth, resource depletion and war. Kurzweil’s rather cheerier vision is a place where super-smart computers augment the brains of their human creators, while nanotechnology — microscopic robots — eliminate disease, reverse the ageing process, and provide unlimited quantities of any desired resource. Clean water? Got it. Copper, aluminum, diamonds? Go ahead and close those mines. Worried about pollution? Don’t be. Nanotech will break down that waste and reconvert its molecules into anything from hamburgers to the latest Shakira DVD. (Shakira in 2030 will look just like Shakira in 2006.) Kurzweil claims that nanotech will become feasible in about 20 years; computer augmentation of the brain will begin a decade or two later. Many people reading this article will still be alive.

Combine the prospect of radically increased mental capacity — possible by linking your biological brain, via a series of tiny implanted nanocircuits, to a computer — with the possibility of a halted ageing process, and you have a recipe for virtually eternal life for radically intelligent people in a pollution-free environment. Even global warming won’t be a problem, once nanotech-designed solar cells become practical. It all sounds a bit idyllic, but Kurzweil makes no apologies: he loves this future. Who wouldn’t?

More here.

From The Wshington Post:

YOU MUST SET FORTH AT DAWN A Memoir by Wole Soyinka: Near the beginning of this sprawling, delightful memoir, Wole Soyinka — Nobel laureate, novelist, playwright, poet and human rights activist — makes a confession: He’s actually “a closet glutton for tranquility.” But his lifelong “craving for peace” has always run counter to the other imperative that has shaped his public persona: his quest for justice, particularly in his native Nigeria.

This weighty memoir, then, gives two views of Soyinka, one of Africa’s best-known and most prolific literary figures. One is the poignant, almost detached observer of Africa’s post-independence history who longs for solitude and takes soothing hunting trips in the bush; the other is the angry activist at the center of political events. The two stories are intertwined, and the book alternates between conversational, humorous passages and enraged ripostes against a succession of corrupt and incompetent Nigerian dictators, particularly Gen. Sani Abacha, the tyrant who ruled from 1993 to 1998 and forced Soyinka into exile on fear of death.

More here.

From Nature:

Eating milk and other dairy products could increase a woman’s chance of having twins, a US doctor is proposing, based on a study of vegan women. The rate of twin births in the United States rose by more than 75% between 1980 and 2003. Some of this can be explained by the use of fertility treatments, which ups the risk of multiple births. But that can’t explain all of the jump, researchers say. Bearing twins is more risky for both mother and child than having a single baby, so scientists want to know what’s causing the rise.

Gary Steinman of the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York, carried out a simple comparison: he gathered together childbearing records for more than 1,000 vegan women who do not eat any animal products. He calculated that vegans were around five times less likely to bear twins than omnivorous women or vegetarians who eat dairy food.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern.”

The opening sentence of “The Power Elite,” by C. Wright Mills, seems unremarkable, even bland. But when the book was first published 50 years ago last month, it exploded into a culture riddled with existential anxiety and political fear. Mills — a broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia — argued that the “sociological key” to American uneasiness could be found not in the mysteries of the unconscious or in the battle against Communism, but in the over-organization of society. At the pinnacle of the government, the military and the corporations, a small group of men made the decisions that reverberated “into each and every cranny” of American life. “Insofar as national events are decided,” Mills wrote, “the power elite are those who decide them.”

His argument met with criticism from all sides. “I look forward to the time when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet’s robes and settles down to being a sociologist again,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The New York Post.

More here.

Keelin McDonell in Slate:

On Thursday, a federal judge in New Hampshire sentenced a former Republican National Committee official to 10 months in prison for his involvement in a 2002 phone-jamming scheme. Three other men have also been convicted of tying up the phone lines of a union headquarters and five New Hampshire Democratic offices on Election Day. What is phone jamming?

Making repeated phone calls to a single number with the intention to intimidate or harass. Phones can be jammed either automatically (with a computer dialing system) or manually. In the New Hampshire case, employees at a telemarketing firm called six separate phone numbers by hand for about two hours. The telemarketers repeatedly called and hung up, placing a total of around 1,000 calls.

More here.

Slavoj Zizek in the London Review of Books:

A century ago, Freud included psychoanalysis as one of what he described as the three ‘narcissistic illnesses’. First, Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth moves around the Sun, thereby depriving humans of their central place in the universe. Then Darwin demonstrated that we are the product of evolution, thereby depriving us of our privileged place among living beings. Finally, by making clear the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, Freud showed that the ego is not master even in its own house. Today, scientific breakthroughs seem to bring further humiliation: the mind is merely a machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy merely a ‘user’s illusion’. In comparison, the conclusions of psychoanalysis seem rather conservative.

Is psychoanalysis outdated? It certainly appears to be. It is outdated scientifically, in that the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of the human mind has superseded the Freudian model; it is outdated in the psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is losing ground to drug treatment and behavioural therapy; and it is outdated in society more broadly, where the notion of social norms which repress the individual’s sexual drives doesn’t hold up in the face of today’s hedonism. But we should not be too hasty. Perhaps we should instead insist that the time of psychoanalysis has only just arrived.

More here.

A poem by Jim Culleny:

Dim Bulb on Watch —North Atlantic
At sea in a cork
on the back of a frothing bull
grey to infinite horizon,
smack in the middle of it,
stupid in adventure,
bullspit flying everywhere,
lurching twenty, thirty feet per leap
pitching, yawing, rolling, falling,
it never occurred to me
that I might drown.

---

And so, the dim bulb
of the boy I was
lit my way. And what
dim bulb still does?

Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books:

Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force as “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” by professors John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Published in the March 23, 2006, issue of the London Review of Books and posted as a “working paper” on the Kennedy School’s Web site, the report has been debated in the coffeehouses of Cairo and in the editorial offices of Haaretz. It’s been called “smelly” (Christopher Hitchens), “nutty” (Max Boot), “conspiratorial” (the Anti-Defamation League), “oddly amateurish” (the Forward), and “brave” (Philip Weiss in The Nation). It’s prompted intense speculation over why The New York Times has given it so little attention and why The Atlantic Monthly, which originally commissioned the essay, rejected it.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

It’s been a little over a year and a half now since scientists announced the disocvery of the most controversial fossil in the field of human origins: Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit. Scientists found bones of a dimunitive hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores, and estimated that it lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago. It stood about as high as a normal three year old human child and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s. But its bones were also found with stone tools. The scientists declared the bones were not human. Instead, they belonged to a species of their own–one that branched off from much older hominids. Later, the scientists offered brain scans and more bones to bolster their case.

I’ve been chronicling the adventures of Homo floresiensis, trying to keep an eye out for new developments. My hobbit posts can be found here. In recent months the scientific reports have tapered off. That may be in part because of the ugly spat between rival paleoanthropologists over access to the bones and the site where they were found. Critics have been putting together attacks against the creation of a new species (most think the bones are from human pygmies, perhaps with birth defects). But those critical papers are slow in coming out.

Today we have the latest development in the hobbit wars, a critical paper from a team of American and British scientists and a response from the original team of scientists.

More here.

Verena Huber-Dyson at Edge.org:

The essence of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is that you cannot have both completeness and consistency. A bold anthropomorphic conclusion is that there are three types of people; those that must have answers to everything; those that panic in the face of inconsistencies; and those that plod along taking the gaps of incompleteness as well as the clashes of inconsistencies in stride if they notice them at all, or else they succumb to the tragedy of the human condition.

More here.

Charles Isherwood in the New York Times:

Life begins tomorrow for the anxious souls inhabiting an overstuffed Bronx apartment in Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!” Or was it over long before yesterday?

Dreams and disappointments, hopes and fears, encouraging words and bitter put-downs clash by day and night in Odets’s turbulent comedy-drama about a Jewish family struggling to stay afloat in the 1930’s. Conflict suffuses the stale air with a tension that almost seems to have mottled the walls. Dinner becomes a simmering battle between factions, in which grievances and recriminations are passed around the table along with the salt and pepper.

In the stirring revival that opened last night at the Belasco Theater, where “Awake and Sing!” was first produced in 1935 during the brief but influential heyday of the Group Theater, the tension derives above all from the question marks on the faces of the younger characters onstage.

More here.  And here is an article about the play by John Lahr. [Thanks to Barbara and Peter Nicholson for taking my wife and me to the play.]

Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed:

Sure, Leonardo studied birds in order to design a flying machine. But if you built it and jumped off the side of a mountain, they’d be scrapping you off the bottom of the valley. Of course very few people could have painted “Mona Lisa.” But hell, anybody can come up with a device permitting you to plunge to your death while waving your arms.

Why should he get all the press, while Athanasius Kircher remains in relative obscurity? He has just as much claim to the title of universal genius. Born in Germany in 1602, he was the son of a gentleman-scholar with an impressive library (most of it destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War). By the time Kircher became a monk at the age of 16, he had already become as broadly informed as someone twice his age.

He joined the faculty of the Collegio Romano in 1634, his title was Professor of Mathematics. But by no means is that a good indicator of his range of scholarly accomplishments. He studied everything. Thanks to his access to the network of Jesuit scholars, Kircher kept in touch with the latest discoveries taking place in the most far-flung parts of the world. And a constant stream of learned visitors to Rome came to see his museum at the Vatican, where Kircher exhibited curious items such as fossils and stuffed wildlife alongside his own inventions.

More here.

Matthew Price in the Los Angeles Times:

Slackers may avoid the humdrum demands of the working life, but they aren’t necessarily lazy. Far from it: They can spend hours blowing hot air about why they avoid the grind. Society says, “Get off your duff”; the slacker volubly retorts, “Why the heck should I?”

Given his subject, it’s perhaps fitting that Lutz rambles on at a slacker-like pace as he traces the rise of this lovable if exasperating cultural type. You might know him — a few women turn up in “Doing Nothing,” but slacking, it turns out, is largely a male phenomenon — from your local video store or coffeehouse. But who knew the slacker had such an illustrious lineage? Samuel Johnson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell and Jack Kerouac all issued spirited dissents to the conventions of work.

More here.