In the BBC:

Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the [British] General Staff, told the Daily Mail that the military campaign fought in 2003 had “effectively kicked the door in”.

He also said that initial planning for the post-war period had been poor.

There are currently more than 7,000 British soldiers in Iraq, based largely in Basra in the south of the country.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said Britain had “a clear strategy” and worked with international partners “in support of the democratically elected government of Iraq, under a clear UN mandate.”

BBC political editor Nick Robinson described Sir Richard’s remarks as “quite extraordinary”.

He said the new head of British army was “effectively saying we are making the situation worse in Iraq and worse for ourselves around the world by being in Iraq”.

[Hat tip: Mark Blyth]

Over at improbable.com:

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don’t get headaches.

REFERENCE: “Cure for a Headache,” Ivan R Schwab, British Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 86, 2002, p. 843.

REFERENCE: “Woodpeckers and Head Injury,” Philip R.A. May, Joaquin M. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7957, February 28, 1976, pp. 454-5.

REFERENCE: “Woodpeckers and Head Injury,” Philip R.A. May, Joaquin M. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7973, June 19, 1976, pp. 1347-8.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Ivan Schwab

NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.

REFERENCE: “Dung Preference of the Dung Beetle Scarabaeus cristatus Fab (Coleoptera-Scarabaeidae) from Kuwait,” Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Musalam, Journal of Arid Environments, vol. 35, no. 3, 1997, pp. 511-6.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Faten Al-Musalam

Steven Pinker’s recent review of George Lakoff’s Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea in The New Republic has set off a debate, with Lakoff and others entering the fray. Pinker:

Let’s begin with the cognitive science. As many of Lakoff’s skeptical colleagues have noted, the ubiquity of metaphor in language does not imply that all thinking is concrete. People could never use a metaphor to reason with unless they had a deeper grasp of which aspects of the metaphor should be taken seriously and which should be ignored. When reasoning about a relationship as a kind of journey, it’s fine to mull over the counterpart to a common destination, or to the bumpy stretches along the way. But someone would be seriously deranged if he wondered whether he had time to pack, or where the next gas station has clean restrooms. Thinking cannot trade in metaphors directly. It must use a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic–progress toward a shared goal in the case of journeys and relationships, conflict in the case of argument and war–while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.

Also, most metaphors are not processed as metaphors as all. They may have been alive in the minds of the original coiners, who needed some sound to express a new concept (such as attack for aggressive criticism). But subsequent speakers may have kicked the ladder away and memorized the idiom by rote. That is why we hear so many dead metaphors, like coming to a head (which most people would stop using if they knew that it alludes to the buildup of pus in a pimple), mixed metaphors (like “Once you open a can of worms, they always come home to roost”), Goldwynisms (“A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”), and figurative uses of “literally,” as in Baruch Korff’s defense of Nixon during his Watergate ordeal: “The American press has literally emasculated the president.” Laboratory experiments have confirmed that people don’t think about the underlying image when understanding a familiar metaphor, only when they are faced with a new one (such as step on the brakes for a relationship).

Lakoff:

There is another scientific divide that Pinker and I are opposite sides of. Pinker interprets Darwin in a way reminiscent of social Darwinists. He uses the metaphor of survival as a competition for genetic advantage. He has become one of the principal spokesmen for a form of evolutionary psychology that claims that there are present genetic differences between men and women that stem from prehistoric differences in gender roles. This led him to support Lawrence Summer’s suggestion that there are fewer women than men in the sciences because of genetic differences.

Luckily, this unfortunate metaphorical interpretation of Darwin has few supporters.

This divide matters because my cognitive analysis, in Moral Politics, of conservative and progressive ideologies in terms of a nation-as-family metaphor is inconsistent with his version of evolutionary psychology. The seriousness of present-day politics in America makes these issues more than a merely academic ivory-tower matter. If I — and other neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and cognitive linguists — are right, then Pinker is wrong, and vice versa.

Weighing in are also Chris at Mixing Memory and Gene Expression.

In the LRB, Corey Robin looks at war, national security and our liberties.

Because war mobilises all spheres of society, defenders of the social order claim that any disruption to that order – from, say, striking labour unions – is as threatening to the war effort as opposition to the war itself. It was on these grounds that in 1950 the Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s denial of labour protection to Communist-led unions. These union leaders, the court argued, might use their positions of power ‘at a time of external or internal crisis’ to call ‘political strikes’ and disrupt the channels of commerce. In January 2003, the office of Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader, sent out a fundraising letter to supporters of the National Right to Work Foundation, a business group seeking to rid America of unions. Claiming that the labour movement ‘presents a clear-and-present-danger to the security of the United States at home and the safety of our Armed Forces overseas’, the letter denounced ‘Big Labour Bosses . . . willing to harm freedom-loving workers, the war effort and the economy to acquire more power!’

Republicans in Congress also worked closely with Bush to deny union rights and whistle-blower protection to 170,000 employees in the Department of Homeland Security. Even though many of them are clerical workers, and even though employees in the Defense Department are not denied these rights, the administration claimed that eliminating them would make the department as ‘agile and aggressive as the terrorists themselves’. After Congress passed the anti-union bill in November 2002, a White House official declared it to be a model for all federal employees.

The government shares these weapons with private employers, who are often better positioned to use and abuse them. Because they aren’t subject to the constraints of the First Amendment, they are generally free to use their powers of hiring and firing, promotion and demotion, to silence dissent. During the McCarthy years, for example, the government imprisoned fewer than two hundred men and women for political reasons. But anywhere between 20 and 40 per cent of the workforce was monitored for signs of ideological nonconformity, which included support for civil rights and labour unions.

The new Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, in The Nation:

I grew up in a house where everyone read novels. My father had a large library, and when I was a child, my father would discuss the great novelists–Mann, Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy–the way other fathers discussed famous generals and saints. From an early age, all these novelists–these great novelists–were linked in my mind with the idea of Europe. But this is not just because I came from an Istanbul family that believed fervently in Westernization, and therefore longed, in its innocence, to believe itself and its country far more Western than they really were. It was also because the novel was one of the greatest artistic achievements to come out of Europe. The novel, like orchestral music and post-Renaissance painting, is in my opinion one of the cornerstones of European civilization; it is what makes Europe what it is, the means by which Europe has created and made visible its nature, if there is such a thing. I cannot think of Europe without novels.

I am speaking now of the novel as a way of thinking, understanding and imagining, and also as a way of imagining oneself as someone else. In other parts of the world, children and young people first meet Europe in depth with their first ventures into novels: I was one of them. To pick up a novel and step inside Europe’s borders, to enter a new continent, a new culture, a new civilization–to learn, in the course of these novel explorations, to express oneself with new desire and new inspiration, and to believe, as a consequence, that one was part of Europe–this is how I remember feeling. And let us also remember that the great Russian novel, and the Latin American novel, also stem from European culture–so just to read a novel is to prove that Europe’s borders, histories and national distinctions are in constant flux. The old Europe described in the French, Russian and German novels in my father’s library is, like the postwar Europe of my own childhood and the Europe of today, a place that is forever changing, and so, too, is our understanding of what Europe means. However, I have one vision of Europe that is constant, and that is what I shall speak of now.

Jonathan Hafetz in The Nation:

The Framers intended the Constitution’s guarantee of habeas corpus, known as the Suspension Clause, to serve as a check on the Executive and on Congress. They sharply restricted the circumstances under which lawmakers can deny prisoners meaningful access to the courts by suspending the writ. Habeas corpus may be suspended, the Constitution states, only in cases of “rebellion or invasion,” when it is required to preserve public safety.

No one who drafted the Constitution raised the slightest objection to the Suspension Clause. America, after all, had not revolted from English tyranny only to create a new regime where individuals could be imprisoned by executive decree. The only debate among the Framers of the Constitution was whether Congress could ever suspend the writ, a question resolved by limiting suspensions to true emergencies.

Since the nation’s founding in 1789, the writ has been suspended on only four occasions, most memorably by President Lincoln during the Civil War. (It was also suspended amid active rebellion in the Reconstruction South and the Philippines in the early 1900s, and in Hawaii during World War II.) Each suspension was carefully limited in duration to the necessity that prompted it. Never before has Congress eliminated habeas corpus for a vast class of individuals (any noncitizen) in amorphous conflict (the global “war on terror”) that could last generations.

More here.

Bob Holmes in New Scientist:

“The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,” says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

If tomorrow dawns without humans, even from orbit the change will be evident almost immediately, as the blaze of artificial light that brightens the night begins to wink out. Indeed, there are few better ways to grasp just how utterly we dominate the surface of the Earth than to look at the distribution of artificial illumination (see Graphic). By some estimates, 85 per cent of the night sky above the European Union is light-polluted; in the US it is 62 per cent and in Japan 98.5 per cent. In some countries, including Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, there is no longer any night sky untainted by light pollution.

More here.

From the AP via the New York Times:

The selection of Pamuk, whose recent trial for ”insulting Turkishness” raised concerns about free speech in Turkey, continues a trend among Nobel judges of picking writers in conflict with their own governments. British playwright Harold Pinter, a strong opponent of his country’s involvement in the Iraq war, won last year. Elfriede Jelinek, a longtime critic of Austria’s conservative politicians and social class, was the 2004 winner.

Pamuk, currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he was overjoyed by the award, adding that remarks he made earlier this year referring to the Nobel literature prize as ”nonsense” were a mistranslation.

More here.

Michael Powell in the Washington Post:

Two major American Jewish organizations helped block a prominent New York University historian from speaking at the Polish consulate here last week, saying the academic was too critical of Israel and American Jewry.

The historian, Tony Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University’s Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of Europe. Judt was scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the consulate. Judt’s subject was the Israel lobby in the United States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest debate.

An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly concluded Judt was too controversial.

More here.

From ScienceDaily:

Today is Thursday, Oct. 12, the 285h day of 2006 with 80 to follow. The moon is waning. The morning stars are Venus and Saturn. Those born on this date are under the sign of Libra. On this date in history:

In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached America, making his first landing in the New World on one of the Bahamas Islands. Columbus believed he had reached India.

In 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev removed one of his shoes and pounded it on his desk during a speech before the United Nations.

In 1973, U.S. President Richard Nixon nominated House Minority Leader Gerald Ford for the vice presidency to replace Spiro Agnew, who had resigned two days earlier.

In 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped injury in the bombing of a hotel in Brighton, England. Four people were killed in the attack, blamed on the Irish Republican Army.

In 1993, New Delhi announced that more than 9,700 people had died in an earthquake the previous month in southern India.

In 1995, a cease-fire took effect in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In 1998, University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard died, five days after the 21-year-old gay man was beaten, robbed and left tied to a fence.

In 1999, the elected government of Pakistan was overthrown in an apparently bloodless military coup. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and several other leaders were arrested.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Kiran Desai’s Booker-winning novel tracks back and forth from the Himalayas to Manhattan. Just like the author, in fact. But rediscovering her Indian-ness was vital to her success, she tells Laura Barton. This morning she sits eating her eggs Benedict neatly, looking faintly bewildered. “I didn’t sleep at all,” she says. “I drank lots of champagne and then tried to sleep for three or four hours and didn’t manage to.” Her phone, she says, is “full of messages from three continents” and she has yet to even speak to her parents. There is an added charm to Desai’s win, as her mother, Anita Desai, has been nominated for the prize three times. “I hope she has heard,” says Desai. “But she’s living in a house without a phone.”

Desai, who is 35, lived in India until she was 14, when she and her mother left first for the UK and then for the US, where she has lived ever since. However, she still holds on to her Indian passport. “Now I could become an American citizen, but then George Bush won and I’ve just been unable to bring myself to do so,” she explains, half-apologetically.

More here.

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.