Mark Kinver at the BBC:

Almost 20% of the world’s population still lacks access to safe drinking water because of failed policies, an influential report has concluded.

The UN World Water Development Report also blames a lack of resources and environmental changes for the problem.

The study calls for better leadership if a goal of halving the proportion of people without proper access to safe water by 2015 is to be achieved.

The findings will be outlined next week at the World Water Forum in Mexico.

Described as the most comprehensive assessment to date of the world’s freshwater supplies, the report said that politicians, businesses and aid charities all had a role to play in addressing the problem.

More here.

Okay, here’s the deal: voting for the Koufax Awards is now officially open, and 3 Quarks Daily is nominated in two categories. To have even a snowball’s chance in hell, we will need every last vote this time!

If you have NOT already voted for us, here is an easier way to do it: send an email to [email protected] with the following line in it:

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

Or you can leave a comment using the same line here. You may have to scroll down a LOT.

PLEASE VOTE NOW! Thanks…

On a lighter note, via Norman Jenson at One Good Move:

New Conversion Table

1. Ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter = Eskimo Pi

2. 2000 pounds of Chinese soup = Won ton

3. 1 millionth of a mouthwash = 1 microscope

4. Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1
bananosecond

5. Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram

6. Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour =
Knotfurlong

7. 16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Serling

8. Half of a large intestine = 1 semicolon

9. 1,000,000 aches = 1 megahertz

10. Basic unit of laryngitis = 1 hoarsepower

11. Shortest distance between two jokes = A straight line

More here, if you can take it!

Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education:

As a kid, my favorite book in the world was E.T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics (1937). I must have read it dozens of times by the age of 14. One afternoon, coming home from the library, I could not resist opening the book to a particularly interesting chapter — and so ended up walking into a parked bus.

With hindsight, certain problems with the book are clear. Bell’s approach to the history of mathematics was exciting, but he achieved that effect, in part, through fictionalization. We now know that embroidering the truth came as second nature to Bell, who was a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology until shortly before his death in 1960. In addition to writing science fiction under a pseudonym, Bell also exercised a certain amount of creativity in telling his own life story – as his biographer, Constance Reid, found out through some detective work.

But another problem with Men of Mathematics only dawned on me recently. I hadn’t thought of the book in ages, but remembered it while reading while reading Letters to a Young Mathematician by Ian Stewart, to be published next month by Basic Books.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Whether about blogs, songs or news stories, when people must make decisions among many different alternatives, those making them later are often greatly influenced by those making them earlier.

That creates a cascading effect that results in a “popular-get-more-popular” sort of phenomenon along many different dimensions.

This is one reason so-called power law distributions are so common in social situations.

In particular, such power law dynamics partially explain the fact that a few blogs are visited by millions, while the vast majority are lucky if they attract the bloggers’ close friends and relatives.

More here.

The editors of The New Republic:

Over the last 25 years, liberalism has lost both its good name and its sway over politics. But it is liberalism’s loss of imagination that is most disheartening. Since President Clinton’s health care plan unraveled in 1994–a debacle that this magazine, regrettably, abetted–liberals have grown chastened and confused, afraid to think big ideas. Such reticence had its proper time and place; large-scale political and substantive failures demand introspection, not to mention humility. But it is time to be ambitious again. And the place to begin is the very spot where liberalism left off a decade ago: Guaranteeing every American citizen access to affordable, high-quality medical care.

More here.

Stanley Crouch in Slate:

Jazz is still the most original aesthetic form to emerge from the United States, but, after the big-band era of the 1930s, most jazz took place in small rooms that held about a hundred people. The sound systems were usually bad, the waitresses obnoxious, the drunks a pain in the backside, and there was little regard for the players as anything more than lower-rung entertainers. If the music was strong enough, however, the audience would quiet down or shout approval when something especially swinging was played. Unlike in today’s more polished venues, the participation of the listeners was not forbidden, and people weren’t expected to keep absolutely quiet until a song ended.

That is how it was when John Coltrane came to prominence and recorded some of his finest work in performance during the 1960s. Coltrane died in 1967 and has since achieved a mythic status that obscures the fact that he redefined jazz for the better and for the worse.

More here.

David Smith’s preoccupations with human and animal form had less to do with a romanticized yearning for a pre-industrial past or, as some critics have suggested, opportunistic cultural grave robbing, than they had to do with an abiding interest in the transformative aspects of technology. In Gary K. Wolfe’s book, “The Known and the Unknown, The Iconography of Science Fiction,” an analytical and theoretical study of the recurring icons that appear throughout the science fiction genre, he states that “Technology not only creates new environments for humanity, it also creates new images of humanity itself, which tend to mediate between the natural environment of mankind and the artificial ones it has created, between the past and the future, and between the known and the unknown.” Smith was interested in the ambiguity of form and the ambiguity inherent in the materials he used. He dwelt upon the fact that steel could be used to make agrarian tools and destructive weapons; it had the potential to manifest a wide spectrum of psychological impulses.

more from Artcritical here.

The English and the French have enjoyed a love-hate relationship for centuries. I say ‘the English’ because the Scots stand rather apart, or betwixt and between. Individual Scots – notably, as Robert and Isabelle Tombs remark, Adam Smith – have helped form a British mindset which the French find repugnant; yet Scots retain fond memories of the Auld Alliance and still speak of England as ‘the auld enemy’ – no sweetness there. Moreover, by a decree of Louis XII, never rescinded, Scots resident in France were to be regarded as French nationals. In August 1944 Colette, most French of all French writers, told her husband she would not believe in the liberation of Paris till he brought her a Scottish officer. ‘In a kilt?’ ‘Certainly in a kilt.’ He produced a major from a Highland regiment, who stayed to lunch. ‘My wife reads a lot,’ he said, ‘I expect she’ll have heard of you.’ This is by the by. It must be admitted, however, that the French usually speak of ‘Angleterre’ and ‘les Anglais’, rather than of Britain and the British.

more from the Literary Review here.

From EGO:

Remember when only one woman could flash that tricky one-two punch of cutting-edge dance-pop and mesmerizing, scandal-drenched visuals? To say that Madonna was an innovator is putting it mildly. To say that she was an instigator is stating the obvious. But to submit that she was the last female pop-culture revolutionary of the 20th century, well…now you’re getting somewhere.

Madonna is an artist for whom fame has reached such unscalable heights, and whose persona has become so infused in the limelight, that one often wonders what it is she became famous for in the first place. One often forgets that Madonna was the first female pop-star who truly owned and controlled her music, image, and career. And in the process she completely manipulated her audience and the media with her songwriting, her videos, and most importantly – her sexuality.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Like all revolutions in thought, this one began with anomalies, strange facts, odd observations that the prevailing wisdom could not explain. Casino gamblers, for instance, are willing to keep betting even while expecting to lose. People say they want to save for retirement, eat better, start exercising, quit smoking—and they mean it—but they do no such things. Victims who feel they’ve been treated poorly exact their revenge, though doing so hurts their own interests.

Such perverse facts are a direct affront to the standard model of the human actor—Economic Man—that classical and neoclassical economics have used as a foundation for decades, if not centuries. Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs against benefits and maximize value and profit to himself. Economic Man is an intelligent, analytic, selfish creature who has perfect self-regulation in pursuit of his future goals and is unswayed by bodily states and feelings. And Economic Man is a marvelously convenient pawn for building academic theories. But Economic Man has one fatal flaw: he does not exist.

When we turn to actual human beings, we find, instead of robot-like logic, all manner of irrational, self-sabotaging, and even altruistic behavior.

More here.

From Science:

Bug parents have it easy. Instead of suffering the starving cries of their babies like bird and mammal mommies do, new research indicates that insects merely need a whiff of their kids to gauge what little ones need. The new findings reveal a novel way for offspring to communicate hunger. Moms receiving odors from ill-fed babies immediately set to finding more food. Mothers gassed with sated-baby odors, on the other hand, slowed their food search.

More here.

Phyllis Chesler in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Is feminism really dead? Well, yes and no. It gives me no pleasure, but someone must finally tell the truth about how feminists have failed their own ideals and their mandate to think both clearly and morally. Only an insider can really do this, someone who cares deeply about feminist values and goals. I have been on the front lines for nearly 40 years, and I feel called upon to explain how many feminists — who should be the first among freedom- and democracy-loving people — have instead become cowardly herd animals and grim totalitarian thinkers. This must be said, and my goal in saying it is a hopeful one. We live at a time when women can and must make a difference in the world.

More here.

Alex Perry in Time Magazine:

Today, there is old India and new India. One is epitomized by the surging chaos that fascinated generations of backpackers and travel writers. The other is the efficient center of outsourcing and IT that thrills today’s investment bankers. Where the two meet, there’s trouble. The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was elected on a tide of rural resentment against the booming cities in spring 2004. That rage continues. Government figures released last month show Naxal violence claimed 892 people last year, up from 653 in 2004. In November, hundreds of guerrillas overran an entire town, broke into its jail and freed almost 400 prisoners. The Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management says the Naxals now control a corridor stretching hundreds of miles across the central hinterland.

More here.

Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute certainly gets the nod for clunkiest title of the year. (Who would have bought Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By if he’d called it Aged Veterans of the Silent Screen Talk Shop to an Inquiring Young Scholar from England?) Luckily, the title of George Stevens Jr.’s collection of interviews isn’t at all indicative of the content. The interviews, culled from seminars held at the American Film Institute in its salad days, are valuable for all sorts of reasons. Here, waxing nostalgic—or just waxing—are George Cukor, William Wyler, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Hal Wallis, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Stanley Cortez, Ernest Lehman, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, King Vidor, Harold Lloyd, James Wong Howe, William Clothier, Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, Ingmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray … among others. There are phenomenal bullshit artists in the mix, and serious artists, and every gradation of craftsman in between, but the prevailing tone set by three quarters of the interviewees is a fierce idealism. Many of these men—yes, it is an all-male crew—say the same thing in different words.

more from the NY Observer here.

Everybody knows what a painter is like. Bigger than life, flaunting convention in both his personal life and art practice, the great man stands at the threshold between the wilderness and civilization, channeling the creative forces of nature as he slathers, wipes, pokes, scrapes and daubs the oily patches of color in a fever of improvised choreography — pausing only to quaff a stein of ale or bang a model — until his latest masterpiece is birthed, ready to be unveiled to the astonished and scandalized bourgeoisie, who, if they play their cards right, may be accorded the privilege of paying through the nose to take the miraculous, revelatory canvas home.

As cartoonish a stereotype as this is, the only part I have any problem with is the implied gender exclusivity. Yet as a myth, its power and centrality have been such that painters (and most other artists) have been exploiting or struggling to undermine it for at least the past century. And they pretty much owe it all to Gustave Courbet, the 19th-century French painter who coined the term “realism,” launched painting on the path of sticky formalist self-absorption that wouldn’t peak until the advent of the Abstract Expressionists, and created a persona for himself that continues to be the template for the market- and publicity-savvy art star to this day.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

From The National Academies:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System, which is considered one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century.

• The longest Interstate is I-90, which runs from Boston to Seattle, a distance of 3,081 miles. At 75 mph it would take you 41 hours to cover that distance non-stop. The second longest is I-80, which covers the 2,907 miles between New York City and San Francisco.
• Interstates 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 35, 40, 70, 75, 80, 90, 94 and 95 are all more than 1,000 miles long.
• The shortest Interstate is I-878 in New York City, which is all of seven-tenths of a mile long. That’s 3,696 feet.
• The highest Interstate route number is I-990 north of Buffalo, NY. The lowest is I-4 across Florida.
• The only state without any Interstate routes is Alaska.
• Interstates carry nearly 60,000 people per route-mile per day, 26 times the amount of all other roads, and 22 times the amount of rail passenger services. Over the past 40 years, that’s the equivalent of a trip to the moon for every person in California, New York, Texas, and New Jersey combined.

More here.

From Science:

On a genetic level, humans and apes are nearly identical, sharing between 96% and 99% of their DNA. So what makes us so different? A new study argues that it comes down to where, when, and how vigorously these genes are expressed. The work emphasizes the importance of gene activity in defining species, says study author Yoav Gilad, a geneticist at the University of Chicago.

More here.

From Majikthise:

Daniel Dennett’s new book Breaking the Spell has been systematically misrepresented by its critics. Frankly, I think a lot of them are getting hung up on the title. Breaking the Spell is not an attempt to discredit religion by subjecting it to scientific scrutiny. The “spell” Dennett wants to break is the taboo against the scientific study of religion. There is widespread concern that understanding religion as a natural phenomenon would undermine religious faith. Dennett agrees that disenchantment is an empirical possibility, but Breaking the Spell doesn’t use naturalistic explanations to refute or discredit religion…

It’s a widely-held article of meta-faith that religion is a force good in the world, irrespective of its truth or falsity. Dennett calls this stance “belief in belief.” Believers in belief insist that religiosity has robust real-world benefits that are, at least in theory, observable by all. They claim that religiosity makes people happier, better behaved, and so on. If religion is so good and science might tarnish religion, then maybe it’s irresponsible to probe too deeply. Even atheists might be prefer to leave well enough alone. Who are we to put our curiosity above the well-being of other people, even if we suspect that they are self-deluded? Some people worry that without religion there is no basis for morality. More cynical observers are concerned that the average person will see no reason to be moral without religion, despite sound non-religious arguments for ethical behavior.

Dennett argues that these worries are premature. The platitudes about the positive dividends of religion are themselves untested. In fact, we don’t know whether religion makes people happier, healthier, more trustworthy, or anything else…

More here.  See more at 3QD about the Dennett book here.