Sympathy for the Devil

From The Village Voice:Devil

In his seven-foot-square riff on the Stones’ 1972 Hot Rocks album cover (in which the band members’ darkened profiles nest within each other like Russian dolls), Gerhard adds a pair of glowing, drippy eyes that confront the viewer from the depths of Keith Richards’s unfathomable brain. In The March (2006), a mob of black figures, their eyes mere streaks of white as if caught in motion by a blinding photo flash, wade through the Washington Monument’s reflecting pool toward an indistinct, backlit blond couple. Is this canvas, covered with gouts of paint spattered across a hellish pink sky, predicting a day of reckoning after four decades of unfulfilled promise? There is a baleful cast to this German painter’s work, but his complex compositions of faux lens flares obscuring outdoor festivals and abstract arcs of bright pigment slathered over idyllic country houses prove darkly alluring.

More here.



In a Ruined Copper Works, Evidence That Bolsters a Doubted Biblical Tale

From The New York Times:

Copper In biblical lore, Edom was the implacable adversary and menacing neighbor of the Israelites. The Edomites lived south of the Dead Sea and east of the desolate rift valley known as Wadi Arabah, and from time to time they had to be dealt with by force, notably by the likes of Kings David and Solomon. Today, the Edomites are again in the thick of combat — of the scholarly kind. The conflict is heated and protracted, as is often the case with issues related to the reliability of the Bible as history.

Chronology is at the crux of the debate. Exactly when did the nomadic tribes of Edom become an organized society with the might to threaten Israel? Were David and Solomon really kings of a state with growing power in the 10th century B.C.? Had writers of the Bible magnified the stature of the two societies at such an early time in history? An international team of archaeologists has recorded radiocarbon dates that they say show the tribes of Edom may have indeed come together in a cohesive society as early as the 12th century B.C., certainly by the 10th. The evidence was found in the ruins of a large copper-processing center and fortress at Khirbat en-Nahas, in the lowlands of what was Edom and is now part of Jordan.

More here.

Sam Mills’s top 10 books about the darker side of adolescence

From The Guardian:

Sammill Sam Mill’s first novel, A Nicer Way to Die, is a dark thriller about a group of 30 pupils who travel to France on a school-trip. A horrific coach crash kills 28 of them, leaving two boys behind: Henry and James, two stepbrothers who share a troubled relationship.
“When I was growing up, there seemed to be two main types of teenage fiction around. The first was fluffy (Sweet Valley High et al) and portrayed growing up as a hunky-dory experience, where beautiful boys met beautiful girls, the greatest trauma in life was not being selected for the cheerleading squad, and all lived happily ever after. The second type, which I feasted on with glee, explored reality. They captured just what a difficult and jagged experience growing up can be. Some teen books can be terribly depressing; they focus too heavily on ‘issues’ (drugs, teen pregnancy etc) and become unrealistic in their bleakness. The most interesting books about teenagers are not afraid to explore the darker side of adolescence, but with humour, insight or humanity. As a result, they become classics because their readership is universal; their protagonists may be teenagers but anyone aged 13 to 80 can enjoy them. Hence, the list I have chosen is a blend of books that have been either published as teen or adult fiction…

1. Lord of The Flies by William Golding
Lord Of the Flies was published in 1954 but is still utterly relevant today.

More here.

The fatter fat

From Nature:

Fat_2 Eating some fats could make you fatter than others, even if their calorie count is the same.
That’s the finding from researchers who fed trans-fatty acids, commonly found in fast food, to monkeys. Those that ate a daily dose of the trans-fatty acids gained 30% more lard around their bellies than those who ate different fats containing exactly the same amount of calories.

‘Trans-fats’ are already considered to be a dietary villain because they boost levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol and promote heart disease. But when it comes to obesity, it is generally assumed that trans, saturated and unsaturated fats are equally problematic, because they are loaded with the same amount of energy. This study says otherwise. It suggests that trans-fats could promote obesity more than other types of fat. People who eat them could be “walking down the road to disaster”, says lead author Kylie Kavanagh at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

More here.

Holbo on Zizek

In The Valve [dot] org, John Holbo reviews Zizek’s The Parallax View:

I count myself as pretty thoroughly hostile to Zizek. Maybe my antipathy is elective. I encountered Zizek first when he was at a low intellectual ebb, with works like On Belief. What revolted me was the strident Leninism, plus inaccurate Kierkegaard exegesis. This political mind, dripping blood; these conceptual fingers, dripping butter—this Slovenian frame, churning it together; distasteful. The bloody-mindedness is on view in Parallax:

It is easy to fall in love with the crazy creative unrest of the first years after the October Revolution, with suprematists, futurists, constructivists, and so on, competing for primacy in revolutionary fervor; it is much more difficult to recognize in the horrors of the forced collectivization of the late 1920’s the attempt to translate this revolutionary fervor into a new positive social order. There is nothing ethically more disgusting than revolutionary Beautiful Souls who refuse to recognize, in the Cross of the postrevolutionary present, the truth of their own flowering dreams about freedom. (p. 5)

It is easy to fall in hate with the crazy restiveness of this failure to notice that if the horrors are implications of the dreams, then the dreams were not true but false. Also, it’s sloppy. Suprematists, Futurists—Filippo Marinetti, say—were not ‘Beautiful Souls’. In On Belief, Zizek complains about liberal leftists who “want a true revolution, yet they shirk the actual price to be paid for it and thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and to keep their hands clean.” Zizek prefers a Leninist—someone who, “like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power.”

Monday, June 12, 2006

Sunday, June 11, 2006

What Does Ehud Olmert Want?

Amos Elon reviews The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 by Gershom Gorenberg, in the New York Review of Books:

Olmert_ehud20060622After weeks of bargaining with smaller parties, each with its own special interests, Ehud Olmert, the leader of the new Kadima party, has finally formed a new Israeli government. The election campaign was overshadowed by the specter of the comatose Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in the third month of a massive hemorrhagic stroke but still formally in office. Hawks and doves pledged their undying loyalty to his “legacy,” whatever it was. Sharon was a reckless, controversial man, exceedingly contradictory— as perhaps many interesting men are; only the dull have simple characters. He was not a man of peace, as President Bush once called him, but out of tune with his time. In an age of decolonization, half a century after the French–Algerian war, he was mainly responsible for the huge “settlement project” in the occupied territories, now often described as the great historical mistake of 1967. The occupied territories continue to fester in Israeli life like a monstrous disease. Their days seem numbered. “I hate the corpses of empires,” Rebecca West wrote. “They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.”[1]

It was a mean little empire, even before the inhabitants became restive. Other colonialists co-opted local elites, intermarried, built universities, great waterworks, and other public amenities for the colonized; Israel did little of the sort. Nearly all real improvements in the territories since 1967 were financed by the Saudis and the Gulf States.

More here.

Tales from the crypt: James Wolcott on the New Yorker

From the New Criterion:

New_yorker_1penn2Other weeklies, such as The Nation and The New Republic, have digitized their archives, but those virtual libraries are maintained online, requiring subscription fees or single payments to access articles. (I’ve used both services to excavate art and movie reviews by Manny Farber, one of my critical idols, that otherwise would have remained orphaned within bound volumes.) The New Yorker was doing The Nation and The New Republic one better by bypassing the entire online rigamarole and giving readers the complete works in a handsome, handy, illustrated multi-disk set.

It was fitting for The New Yorker to lavish such love on itself, given its status as a cult object and coffee-table signifier of taste and breeding. The New Yorker is the only magazine in America, probably in the world, to inspire reverence and druidical devotion.

More here.

The Mythical Port of Muziris Found

In the BBC:

Archaeologists working on India’s south-west coast believe they may have solved the mystery of the location of a major port which was key to trade between India and the Roman Empire – Muziris, in the modern-day state of Kerala.

For many years, people have been in search of the almost mythical port, known as Vanchi to locals.

Much-recorded in Roman times, Muziris was a major centre for trade between Rome and southern India – but appeared to have simply disappeared.

Now, however, an investigation by two archaeologists – KP Shajan and V Selvakumar – has placed the ancient port as having existed where the small town of Pattanam now stands, on India’s south-west Malabar coast.

(Hat tip: Chandan Narayan)

Giving Robots the Sense of Touch

In Scientific American:

One of the biggest challenges in robotics engineering is mimicking the human sense of touch. The ability to respond to texture and pressure is essential for delicate tasks, such as surgery. To that end, researchers have developed a new type of sensor that has a tactile sensitivity comparable to that of human fingertips–making it 50 times more sensitive than previously existing technology.

The device, a so-called electroluminescent thin film, glows in response to applied pressure. The result is a finely detailed image of the texture of any object that touches the film. Designers Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi Saraf of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln demonstrated this effect by pressing a penny against the device (see image). Because the sensor produces data in the form of an optical image, the data can be quickly and easily collected by simply photographing the image. This represents a major step forward in the ease and efficiency of collecting information from tactile sensors. Quick data collection is critical to performing real-time tasks, for example grasping a tool with a robotic arm. If the tool starts to slip, the image produced by the electroluminescent film immediately shows the tool’s motion, and the robot’s grip can then be adjusted to prevent it from falling.

Naming the Beautiful Game

Apparently, it was “soccer” before it was “football”, in Der Spiegel. (Via Political Theory Daily Review).

Many football fanatics merely assume that the word “soccer” is just another marsupial American tradition — like 190-1 votes in the United Nations and men in suits driving Humvees through busy downtowns — inevitable in a country surrounded on two sides by oceans.

A certain self-righteousness also comes with the isolated territory. “Well,” the American in the pub said to the Liverpool fan, “my kind of football’s a little more rough-and-tumble, if you know what I mean. It’s not, you know, as polite as all this.” He waved at the TV above the bar. “But I can appreciate soccer. There’s something sort of pretty about it.”

But as much as the world likes to mock Americans for their ignorance of the beautiful game, football just isn’t the correct term for it in English. Soccer is right.

The world comes from 19th-century British slang for “Association Rules” football, a kicking and dribbling game that was distinct from “Rugby rules” football back when both versions were played by British schoolboys. The lads who preferred the rougher game popular in schools like Rugby and Eton seceded from Britain’s fledgling Football Association in 1871 to write their own rules, and soon players were calling the two sorts of football “rugger” and “soccer.”

The NYT Edges Towards a “Review of the Review Review”

I’d add one more layer to the survey/review, but it should stop here

Early this year, the Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.” [See the winners. Read A. O. Scott’s essay. See a list of the judges. Follow a discussion with Jane Smiley, Michael Cunningham, Morris Dickstein and Stephen Metcalf.] Here is a selective list of blogs, with text taken verbatim from posts commenting on the project…

Lawyers, Guns and Money

May 11, 6:58 AM. By Robert Farley.

There are only three works since 2000, including two of what I thought were fairly weak Roth efforts (Human Stain and especially Plot Against America), which suggests to me that distance and hindsight are important to a project like this. I imagine that a couple of hundred prominent writers and critics asked in 2015 would return a much different set of works from the first part of this decade.

(The joke “review of the review review is Morgan’s, as Abbas notes in the comments.)

Remembering Golding’s Last Day

In the Guardian, DM Thomas remembers William Golding.

I walked into a fish-and-chip shop in Truro, about 15 years ago, and joined a queue. At the head of it was an elderly man with wild white hair and beard, wearing a grubby raincoat. I recognised William Golding. I mused about the odds against walking into a chippie and seeing a Nobel Laureate having fish and chips wrapped. He shuffled past me without recognition and I didn’t say hello. It seemed an embarrassment to do so, almost as if I’d caught him buying a top-shelf magazine.

We had something in common beside fish-and-chips, wild white hair, grubby raincoats and writing novels. I had returned to my native Cornwall in 1987, a few years later than he had done. We don’t think of Golding as Cornish, but his mother was Cornish, and he was born near Newquay. His parents had married in Truro Cathedral. I lived with my wife Denise and our son in Truro, Golding a few miles away, in the village of Perranarworthal. He’d moved back from Wiltshire, I’d heard, partly to escape from the hordes of fans and trashcan-raiders, partly because he was proud of his Cornish roots.

High minded: Walter Benjamin’s writings on drugs

From The Boston Globe:Benjamin

AT FIRST GLANCE, Walter Benjamin, the bespectacled, bushy mustached, deeply serious, and influential German literary critic, may not strike you as a likely drug user. Indeed, he considered drugs a “poison,” and a rather disreputable one at that. As Marcus Boon writes in his introduction to “On Hashish,” a slim English translation of Benjamin’s writings on drugs, just published by Harvard University Press, “Drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of celebration in Benjamin’s intellectual milieu” in the Berlin of the 1920s and early `30s.

And yet, surprisingly, few writers have approached the experience of intoxication with Benjamin’s earnestness, profound wonderment, and sense of purpose. Neither a recreational user nor an addict, he had a studious, deliberate, almost scholarly approach. In 1927, persuaded by some doctor friends to take part in their research, Benjamin began to dabble in a range of drugs-opium, hashish, mescaline-and recorded his experiences in a series of fragments and “protocols”: observations in Benjamin’s hand alternating with the musings of his medical pals.

In the writings collected in “On Hashish,” some composed during a drug session, others afterwards in recollection (Benjamin only published two drug-related texts in his lifetime), the often forbidding theorist appears in a playful, relaxed mode.

More here.

Kitty Cam Reveals Killers in Our Midst

Cat_2 From The National Geographic:

In a dark alley the stealthy killer stalks her next unsuspecting victim. This isn’t the plot of a pulp comic, but an everyday occurrence in the life of a pampered urban house cat.

Get a cat’s-eye view of one pet’s nightly prowl, and find out why the activities of our feline friends are raising the hackles of some wildlife conservationists.

Video here.  (This one is for Guddi).

Aula 2006 ─ Movement: Joichi Ito

NOTE: All posts at 3QD related to the Aula 2006 ─ Movement event, including this one, will be collected on this page. Bookmark it to stay on top of the Aula meeting at all times for the next week.

450pxjoichi_itoThe last keynote speaker at the Aula 2006 ─ Movement meeting in Helsinki next week is Joi Ito, who hardly needs me to introduce him. Most of you have probably at least heard his name, it is so ubiquitous on the web. Among other things, he was one of the early bloggers and Joi’s blog remains one of the most-visited in the world. As a matter of fact, Joi gave me some good advice by email about blogging in the early days of 3QD, and I am looking forward to finally meeting him face to face.

This is from Joi’s bio on Wikipedia:

Joi Ito, is a Japanese-born, American-educated, activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

Ito has received much recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains a blog, a wiki, an IRC channel and contributes to the Tokyo Metroblogging. Early on, Joi was involved in running a nightclub in Japan, bringing industrial music from Chicago (Wax Trax) and later the rave scene, including importing Anarchic Adjustment to Japan. He was an active player on the first Multi User Dungeons (MUD) at Essex University and once worked with Sega, on the Dreamcast‘s online features.

He also appears as a character in a webcomic, The Adventures of Epicenter, which was once linked to in his blog.

185pxwow_box_artI am sure that others besides me must also wonder how Joi can possibly have time for everything that he does, but to his unbelievably busy schedule he has managed to add the time-drain of playing World of Warcraft! In a short article he recently published in Wired (and which I had also posted at 3QD a few days ago) he confesses that:

I started playing a year ago and have become custodian of We Know, a guild of about 250 people worldwide: medics, CEOs, bartenders, mothers, soldiers, students. We assemble in-game to mount epic six-hour raids that require some members to wake at 4 am and others to stay up all night. Outside the game, we stay in touch using online forums, a wiki, blogs, and a mailing list – plus a group voice chat, which I’ve connected to my home stereo so I can hear the guild’s banter while I’m cooking dinner. I have never been this addicted to anything before. My other hobbies are gone. My daily blogging regimen has taken a hit. And my social life revolves more and more around friends in the game.

But don’t let this fool you into thinking that Joi is any less productive than ever before. Check out some of his current activities (also listed at his Wikipedia page):

…Ito is [currently] General Manager of International Operations for Technorati, Chairman of Six Apart Japan, and also currently a member of the board of Creative Commons, Socialtext, The Metabrainz Foundation and Technorati Japan. He is the Chairman of the board of Creative Commons International. He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. In October of 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004. In April of 2005, he was named to the board of the Open Source Initiative. In August of 2005, he joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation. In 2006 he was appointed to the board [1] of WITNESS.

And as if this weren’t enough:

He is attempting, again, to educate himself and is studying at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy [2] as a Doctorate of Business Administration candidate…

There is far more one could say about Joi, but I’ll end by saying that he is endlessly surprising. For example, I recently found out that he is Timothy Leary’s godson! Check out Joi’s touching remembrance of Leary on the 10th anniversary of his death:

Tim321tm Timothy Leary passed away 10 years ago today. I was with him the evening before he died and I still remember his humor even in his final hour.

I met Timothy Leary in Tokyo in the summer of 1990. Tim was excited about virtual reality and had told his friend David Kubiak in Kyoto to help him track down “young Japanese kids who know about virtual reality”. I wasn’t a VR expert, but I was into computer graphics, games and the rave/club scene. I had also just opened a nightclub in Tokyo. David, who lived in Kyoto, directed Tim to me and several others in Tokyo and we hooked up with him at a bar.

I hijacked the situation. After dinner I grabbed Tim and took him on a whirlwind tour of the Tokyo club scene.

Read the rest of that post here. If you want more info on Joi, Google him and, trust me, you’ll get plenty to keep you going for quite a while. See you on Wednesday, Joi!

Saturday, June 10, 2006

In the Twinkle of a Fly

Rudolf A. Raff reviews Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development by Nobel-laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, in American Scientist:

Fullimage_200653113635_866Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is one of the pioneers in the groundbreaking discoveries that revealed how genes regulate the development of animal embryos. For this effort she shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Eric F. Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. In Coming to Life, she provides an engaging and clear summary of what developmental biologists now understand about how embryos work.

The existence of such an apparently simple guide shows how much we have come to take for granted the explanation of development by gene regulation. However, it should be understood that what Nüsslein-Volhard describes actually represents the outcome of one of the premier intellectual triumphs of human thought—one that has been achieved within only the past two and a half decades.

Consider the profound difficulty embryonic development presents to an observer. A complex organism, such as a chick, frog, insect or human, arises in an orderly and magical way from an apparently structureless egg.

More here.

Christopher Columbus, Failure

Christine Gibson at American Heritage:

20060520columbusNo matter how widely he had been hailed as a hero 14 years before, by 1506, when he died (500 years ago today), Christopher Columbus was all washed up.

Crowds from across Spain lined the streets of Seville in 1493 to welcome him home from his first voyage to the Americas, but he already hadn’t found what he was looking for, a seaway to India’s spice-trade ports. He never would, though the search consumed the rest of his life. A little genocide here, some slavery there, several mutinies, and multiple executions of crew members later, and Columbus fell out of favor with the Spanish crown and the public. When he died he was surrounded by family and by the trappings of his substantial income. But he went to his grave with the gouging sense of injustice he couldn’t forgive and of failure he couldn’t explain.

His reputation began to sour during his second expedition.

More here.

Good Scout

From The New York Times:

‘Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,’ by Charles J. ShieldsLee

Here is a book about a woman who knew when to get off the train. A tomboy from Monroeville, Ala., editor of her college humor magazine, The Rammer Jammer, and law school dropout, she took it on the lam to New York, got a job, made friends and managed to write a novel that hit the best-seller lists and stayed there, won a Pulitzer, got made into a major movie and became a staple of high school English along with “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Great Gatsby.” Total sales are somewhere around 30 million, and it continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year.

She worked for years on a second novel, and then, in the mid-1980’s, on a book of nonfiction about a serial murder in Alabama, neither of which worked out to her satisfaction and so she squashed them. She made her peace with being a one-book author. Unlike her friend Truman Capote, she didn’t enjoy the limelight. So she backed away from celebrity, declined to be interviewed or be honorifically degreed and simply lived her life, sometimes in Manhattan, riding city buses, visiting museums and bookstores in her running suit and sneakers, seeing old friends, and most of the time in Monroeville, in a ranch house with her older sister Alice, a house full of books. Built-in bookshelves, floor to ceiling.

More here.

Among the Brainiacs: Intellectuals descend on Soccer

Bryan Curtis in Slate:

060607_middle_soccerillotn2For decades, it was baseball that felt brainy and top-heavy—thanks to the efforts of men like George F. Will, who was forever wondering how Tony LaRussa reminded him of Tocqueville. From John Cheever to Stephen Jay Gould, baseball’s beat poets looted the game for metaphors for and clues to the national character. Those same deep thoughts are now regularly located in soccer, which seems primed to yield both grand sociopolitical theories and inchoate childhood longings.

What brought soccer to the smart set? Well, one could simply argue that soccer’s time had come. Many of the writers in question (Eggers, Foer) were in their formative years when soccer became a mandatory youth sport in America, as well as a part of the American sporting scene (a moment generally pegged at Pelé’s signing by the New York Cosmos in 1975.) “What you’re seeing now is the result of the gold rush of soccer in the 1970s, when Pelé came to America and made it cool for kids,” says David Hirshey, soccer aficionado and executive editor of HarperCollins. “Those kids have grown up to be McSweeney’s and Granta writers.”

More here.