From Scientific American:

The ultimatum game brings out conflicting impulses in human beings. In the game, a researcher offers two players a set amount of money and explains that if they agree on how to divvy it up they will keep that money for themselves. If they don’t, neither will get anything. One player then offers the other a split. Our thirst for fairness dictates that most players will reject a patently unfair division–such as offering only $4 out of a total of $20. Yet, self interest would argue that even $4 is better than nothing, which is what will otherwise result. Brain imaging studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex is engaged when players ponder an offer and now new research finds that damping down activity in that region can set free our selfish side.

More here.

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

Elections and electronic voting machines invite consideration of the following thought experiment. You go to your local voting station, walk into the booth, pull the curtain, and see a well-dressed man standing inside with a little note pad. He asks whom you’re voting for, appears to record what you say in his note pad, tells you he’ll add your vote to his running total, thanks you, and asks you to send the next voter into the booth.

Whatever objections you have to this voting scenario should be reserved for the more familiar one involving Diebold and other voting machines. It’s long been known that electronic machines run proprietary software and don’t keep paper records of the votes cast. Similarly, the man in the voting booth also runs proprietary “mental software” whose commitment to honesty we have no way of ascertaining and simply supplies us with the vote total at the end of the day. He’s probably honest and careful and, since he seems to be taking notes, his total is likely to be accurate, but would you trust such a voting system?

More here.

Jeff Hecht in New Scientist:

“I have always hoped to win a real Nobel prize for medicine,” Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine told New Scientist. Nevertheless, he settled for the Ig Nobel prize in medicine instead, handed out along with nine other Ig Nobel prizes in a Thursday evening ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US.

It might be some consolation to note that a real Nobel prize winner was pushing a broom on stage to sweep away the paper airplanes traditionally thrown by the audience. The Annals of Improbable Research, which produces the Ig Nobel ceremony, points out that the 10 years that Harvard physicist Roy Glauber has spent sweeping the stage did not affect his selection as a physics laureate in 2005.

Fesmire, a specialist in emergency medicine and cardiology, probably did not have a real Nobel in mind when he published “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage” in Annals of Emergency Medicine (vol 17, p 872). He was, it transpires, attempting to help a man who walked into the emergency room after hiccuping for 72 hours at up to 30 times a minute.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

This morning it was announced that two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and or Medicine, for their 1998 discovery of a hidden network of genes. It may seem odd that a network of genes could lurk undiscovered for so long. But the cell is very much a mysterious place. In the 1950s, scientists established the basic model for how genes work. A gene is made of DNA, the cell makes a single-stranded copy of a gene in a molecule called RNA, and it then uses the RNA as a template for building a protein. This so-called Central Dogma proved to be correct for many thousands of genes, but not all of them. In many cases, a gene’s RNA is not a mere messenger. It grabs onto other RNA molecules or proteins, and carries out some important chemistry of its own.

More here.

Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books:

In 1998 two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded Google.com, a search engine that uses a better technology than had previously existed for indexing and retrieving information from the immense miscellany of the World Wide Web and for ranking the Web sites that contain this information according to their relevance to particular queries based on the number of links from the rest of the Internet to a given item. This PageRank system transformed the Web from its original purpose as a scientists’ grapevine and from the random babble it soon became a searchable resource providing factual data of variable quality to millions of users. And once again it was the exigencies of commerce that transformed Google itself from an ingenious search technology without a business plan to a hugely profitable enterprise offering a variety of services including e-mail, news, video, maps, and its current, expensive, and utterly heroic, if not quixotic, effort to digitize the public domain contents of the books and other holdings of major libraries. This new program would provide users wherever in the world Internet connections exist access to millions of titles while enabling libraries themselves to serve millions of users without adding a foot of shelf space or incurring a penny of delivery expense.

Spurred by Google’s initiative and by the lower costs, higher profits, and immense reach of unmediated digital distribution, book publishers and other copyright holders must at last overcome their historic inertia and agree, like music publishers, to market their proprietary titles in digital form either to be read on line or, more likely, to be printed on demand at point of sale, in either case for a fee equal to the publishers’ normal costs and profit and the authors’ contractual royalty, thus for the first time in human history creating the theoretical possibility that every book ever printed in whatever language will be available to everyone on earth with access to the Internet.

More here.

Matthew B. Crawford in The New Atlantis:

I began working as an electrician’s helper at age fourteen, and started a small electrical contracting business after college, in Santa Barbara. In those years I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in a commercial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked. As a residential electrician, most of my work got covered up inside walls. Yet even so, there is pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation. Maybe another electrician will see it someday.

More here.

“—science per se—”
my God, when I hear them on the radio saying that,
it slays me.
Is there a science that’s not per se?
I don’t get out much, rarely get to see any lakes,
gardens only sporadically and then behind fences,
or in allotments, that’s about the size of it,
I rely on ersatz:
radio, newspaper, magazines—
so how can people say such things to me?

more from Gottfried Benn’s “Radio” at Poetry Magazine here.

Let’s get the obvious question out of the way: do we need another biography of Thomas Hardy? Yes, we do. First of all, because Hardy is one of the most mysterious writers in English literature; and second of all, because this one is by Claire Tomalin, who always brings an acute and original intelligence to bear. Here she ranges herself with the calmer Hardy scholars, Michael Millgate in particular: no evidence for an affair with his cousin Tryphena, for example, or for a family model for Tess. She mops our brows, too, about Hardy’s famous response to seeing a woman hanged. Did he find her still an attractive woman at the point of death? ‘Only too likely, surely, but hardly culpable’; merely expressing the painful truth that she was young and beautiful, and at the same time dead.

more from Literary Review here.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s wonderful new book, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, opens with a scene worthy of Graham Greene. “On the morning of the fine spring day, full of sunshine, that ended with my arrest in Gaza, I woke early from an uneven sleep, dressed, and pushed back to its proper place the desk meant to barricade the door of my hotel room,” he writes. It was six months into the second Intifada, and Mr. Goldberg (no relation) was on assignment for The New Yorker. After breakfast with an “unhappy terrorist” with a penchant for Russian literature and a visit to the freshly bombed base of Yasir Arafat’s personal bodyguard unit, he repaired to a café. There, he was seized by gunmen from one of Gaza’s security services—he couldn’t determine which one—and accused of being an Israeli spy.

more from The NY Observer here.

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Talesand Amazing Stories, “where…they ought to have been left.”[1] Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult— there is no other word—that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

Since then, though, for a writer who depended entirely on the meager sustenance of the pulps and whose brief career brought him sometimes to the brink of actual starvation, whose work did not appear in book form during his lifetime (apart from two slender volumes, each of a single story, published by fans) and did not attract the attention of serious critics before his death in 1937, Lovecraft has had quite an afterlife. His influence has been far-reaching and, in the last thirty or forty years, continually on the increase, if often in extraliterary ways.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

In the New York Times, Margaret Wertheim, author of Pythagoras’ Trousers, on math and physics in Western culture and its implications for women in the sciences.

Pythagoras introduced numbers into this mix and put them on the male side of the ledger. In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm…

The Pythagorean association of mathematics with transcendence was easily imported into a Christian context, giving rise to the idea of the Judeo-Christian god as a mathematical creator. When Stephen Hawking links a theory of everything to the mind of god today, he is reiterating an essentially Pythagorean view. But this godly-mathematical connection also sat easily with the Catholic tradition of a male-only priesthood. Thus, from the start, women were excluded from this academic field and its associated sciences…

Many women who have gone into science since the 1970’s continue to be stunned at how slow change has been. Gail G. Hanson, distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, Riverside, and the only woman to have won the W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in experimental particle physics, said by phone: “At this point there seems to be an acceptance of women in science at relatively junior levels. But once we get to more senior levels, a kind of antagonism sets in.”

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Dr. Hanson discovered quark jets, the work for which she would later be awarded the Panofsky Prize. Yet throughout her research career, she said, she has continued to be treated like a junior colleague, not like a leading researcher.

Via Lindsay Beyerstein, Amnesty urgently appeals to its members and concerned people to write to the Iranian government in regard to this impending stoning of seven women in Iran.

Amnesty International has issued an urgent appeal calling on its members to write letters to the Republic of Iran asking them not to stone seven women.

Nearly all of the women have been sentenced to die by stoning for adultery. Officially Iran had placed a moratorium on the cruel and painful practise in 2002, but Amnesty claims sentencing continues. The group has received credible reports that two people were stoned to death in May.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has ruled that treating adultery and fornication as criminal offences does not comply with international human rights standards.

“The sentence of execution by stoning for adultery breaches Iran’s commitment under article 6(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that death sentences will be imposed ‘only for the most serious crimes’,” Amnesty wrote in its appeal.

Under Shari’a law, a prisoner is buried up to her breast, her hands restrained. Rules also specify the size of the stones which can be thrown so that death is painful and not imminent. Both men and women can be sentenced to die by stoning.

Ali Eteraz has some suggestions for action and a template letter to Iran’s Minister of Justice.

And in Reason Online, more on the Military Commission Act.

The new trial procedures, though problematic in some ways, are a clear improvement over the Bush administration’s original rules, which the Supreme Court overturned because they were not authorized by Congress. But these protections are available only to the detainees the government decides to try. The rest, including the vast majority of current detainees, can be imprisoned indefinitely based on the findings of Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which perfunctorily confirm the government’s detention decisions.

The Military Commissions Act does not seem to require even this pro forma review. It says an “unlawful enemy combatant” is a person who is not part of a country’s uniformed armed forces but “who has engaged in hostilities or has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” It does not say who makes that determination or what evidence, if any, is required.

Alternatively, an unlawful enemy combatant is anyone so labeled by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which can apply its own definition. The act apparently would permit a tribunal to decide a detainee must be an unlawful enemy combatant because he’s named Muhammad or because he has a beard.

The law bars detainees who are not U.S. citizens from challenging their detention in federal court, so they have no legal recourse outside the executive branch. The government can arrest “aliens,” including legal visitors and residents, and hold them indefinitely, based on nothing more than the president’s unilateral determination that they qualify as unlawful enemy combatants.

To recognize the danger of giving the executive branch this kind of unreviewable power, you need look no further than the men sent to Guantanamo Bay because they were falsely identified as Al Qaeda or Taliban hangers-on by Afghan warlords hungry for bounty money.

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights in The Nation:

Twice in the past five years the Supreme Court has insisted that habeas corpus applies to these prisoners and ruled that the Bush Administration must apply the law. Yet last week Congress buckled in the face of election-year rhetoric about “terrorism” from the White House and passed new legislation denying our clients the right to challenge their detentions, or even to see the evidence against them. While I’m convinced that this law will not stand in court, we are still facing at least a year of challenges before it is declared unconstitutional.

ut it is not only our clients who are in jeopardy under this new legislation. Americans need to remember the sweeps and mass detentions after September 11, 2001, when thousands of noncitizens were rounded up and treated as terrorists–which none of them turned out to be. Habeas corpus was their remedy; they could go to court and force the Administration to justify their detentions. Now noncitizens can be rounded up, detained forever and never get their case into a court.

And yet, even more sadly, the tossing aside of habeas corpus was only one of the draconian features of the Military Commission Act.

Another nasty piece of the legislation authorizes the President, on his own authority, to detain anyone, citizen or noncitizen, anywhere in the world, whom he deems to be an “unlawful enemy combatant.” The definition of that term is broadly worded and would allow the President to imprison almost anyone.

If you are unlucky enough to be a noncitizen and the President detains you as an unlawful enemy combatant, you can never test the legality of your detention in court because habeas corpus has been abolished. You are there forever… or until the President changes his mind. If you are lucky enough to be a citizen, your habeas rights will not get you out quickly: The President can now detain any citizen he chooses, without charges, simply by declaring that the prisoner is an enemy combatant.

From The Atlantic Monthly:

The battle between the sexes continues unabated in T. C. Boyle’s latest novel. Decked out as a thriller — complete with a heroine thirsting for justice, a wily villain scrambling to stay one step ahead, cross-country chases, and close escapes — it is also another T. C. Boyle story of relationships gone awry, of strong women and the slightly awestruck men who orbit them. (The eternal mystery of Woman has always fascinated Boyle; most of his novels exalt females as somehow more-than-human presences who dwell among lesser, mortal males.)

The strong woman in question this time around is a deaf English teacher with a brittle personality, a chip on her shoulder, and a formidable will. Unlike most Boyle heroines, she’s not very likable, but she does elicit a certain grudging respect. (Her sidekick/boyfriend, an affable nonentity, serves mainly as a foil.) The real star is her nemesis, a slick crook building a career as an identity thief. By turns conciliatory and vengeful, doting and irresponsible, debonair and crude, he steals her identity and your sympathy; when their paths finally cross, you’re rooting for them both.

More here.

From Scientific American:

More people survive cancer than ever before. With early detection, for example, women stricken with breast cancer are often successfully treated and go on to live long lives. But concomitant with this cheering rise in cancer survival is a worrying increase in complaints about cognitive impairment as life goes on. Some cancer survivors have trouble with concentration or fatigue. New research shows this is not just in their minds but, in fact, in their brains.

Daniel H. Silverman of the University of California, Los Angeles and a cross-disciplinary group of doctors, including UCLA oncologist Patricia Ganz, used scans to try to identify the brain basis for this intellectual deficit. Using positron emission tomography (PET) the researchers tracked both blood flow in the brain as well as the presence of a glucose analogue to examine brain metabolism. The researchers examined 40 regions of the brain as the women performed a word-pairing memory task six times to see how the woman–and their brains–differed. The chemotherapy patients showed a significant jump in blood flow to the frontal cortex and cerebellum compared with the controls. “They had to work harder to carry out the same cognitive tasks”.

More here.

It is a shame that Tod Papageorge’s black-and-white photographs are not better known. While many lesser figures have enjoyed sold-out shows during the ongoing boom, Papageorge has been absent from New York galleries for more than 20 years (though his work can be found in numerous surveys and histories of contemporary American photography). A pivotal figure in making a street-savvy, elegant, hyperkinetic, 35 mm style the dominant aesthetic among a generation of American artists during the ’70s, Papageorge at the same time established himself as an articulate and occasionally biting critic of others’ work. Later, as professor at the Yale School of Art, where he has directed the graduate program in photography since 1979, he became a force in the lives of countless students, many of whom have gone on to become eminent artists and teachers themselves, among them Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Abelardo Morell, Gregory Crewdson, An-My L�, Anna Gaskell, and Katy Grannan.

more from Bomb here.

The last time the art of Gary Panter was featured in Los Angeles was less than a year ago, when his virtuosic and groundbreaking Jimbo — the postapocalyptic Tintin-on-nitrous-and-steroids slacker whose adventures were originally a staple of the L.A. punk-era zine Slash — was included in MOCA’s half of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibit, a show that garnered considerable positive press and inched forward the general acceptance of comics as a legitimate artistic medium (whatever that means). Panter’s inclusion, while absolutely unimpeachable on aesthetic or historical grounds, was never a foregone conclusion — the show’s brief roster had numerous glaring omissions, and Panter’s work still provokes flurries of disapproval from anal geeks for his deliberately scraggy line and his complex and fragmented literary voice.

more from the LA Weekly here.

William H. McNeill in the New York Review of Books:

In 1879 a Spanish landowner named Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola was searching for prehistoric artifacts on the floor of a cave on his family property in northern Spain when his young daughter interrupted, calling out “Look, Papa, oxen” as she looked up at the cave’s ceiling and “saw vivid yet delicate paintings of bison, almost fully life-sized, that appear to be tumbling across the sky.” Her discovery swiftly brought ancient cave paintings to widespread public attention, and set off a complex history of dispute about their origin and meaning. Since then, thousands of similar paintings have been discovered in more than two hundred caves scattered through southwestern France and northeastern Spain on either side of the Pyrenees. Argument still rages about them and the contrasting viewpoints of the two books under review carry the controversy forward.

A century of study widened the initial focus on the Altamira cave, where Sautuola’s daughter made her discovery, but all the additional images and reliable radiocarbon dating of bits of charcoal used to make black paint for many of the drawings have not diminished disagreement about the nature and purpose of the sometimes masterful, sometimes enigmatic, yet often hasty, or even clumsy, cave art of Europe.

More here.

Aravind Adiga in Time:

Poliomyelitis, a contagious viral disease that once crippled and killed thousands of children annually, has been eliminated in most of the Western world thanks to a vaccine invented by Jonas Salk in the 1950s, but it still survives in some of the world’s poorest countries. India seemed to be on the verge of eliminating polio last year, when it reported just 66 cases of the disease, down from 1600 in 2002. This year, however, things have gone horribly wrong with India’s polio elimination campaign; 325 cases have been reported already, and at least 23 of them have been fatal. What’s caught people’s attention is that 70% of those infected with polio this year are Muslim, even though Muslims account for only 13% of India’s population. What’s even stranger, and frightening, is the reason: some Muslims believe that the polio drops are part of a conspiracy to sterilize their children, and are refusing to let them be vaccinated.

More here.