From Nature:

“What’s your Abel number?” was the big question being asked by pharmacologists this week at the Experimental Biology meeting in Washington, DC. Members of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) were swept up in a game, akin to playing six degrees of separation, in which researchers compete to be the most closely related to the man regarded as the field’s founder: John J. Abel.

Abel pioneered the discipline of pharmacology in the late nineteenth century, forming departments at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University, and founding ASPET. Most famous for his work isolating adrenaline, an important stress hormone, Abel published almost 100 papers during his career. These papers are shared with a total of 27 co-authors, who, in the new game, are assigned an ‘Abel number’ of 1. Those 27 scientists co-published with at least 278 individuals (who get an Abel number of 2), who in turn published with at least 3,000 more (Abel number 3s).

Bylund borrowed the idea from mathematicians, who define themselves with an Erdos number to see how close they are to the late and extremely prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos.

More here.

In the Economist:

SEX, in most species of bird, is a consensual activity. It has to be. Males have no penises and are armed with a genital opening which looks little different from that of a female. Intercourse happens when these two openings are brought together in what ornithologists refer to as a cloacal kiss. In these circumstances, rape is a difficult option.

Drakes, however, are notorious rapists—forcing their attentions on ducks indiscriminately—and it is surely no coincidence that they are among the 3% of male birds that do have a penis. In fact, drake penises come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes that are thought by students of the subject to be part of an arms race to ensure that it is the owner’s sperm that fertilise the next generation of ducklings, rather than anybody else’s.

The question is, an arms race against whom? The males of many species of insect have similarly elaborate genitalia. These seem designed to compete directly against other males—for example by scraping out the sperm of previous suitors or breaking off and blocking the female’s genital opening. But Patricia Brennan, of Yale University, and her colleagues suspected that in ducks and drakes the arms race might be between the sexes rather than between members of the same sex. Females, in other words, would rather choose which males inseminate them. And if rape is inevitable, evolution might provide them with other ways of making this choice.

I think my on-again, off-again interest in Hitchens results from this: in Hitchens we find a distilled logic of the confused, often self-indulgent, and vain politics that emerged with the collapse of the New Left. (Yes, there are some good things to say about it.) If we find in the politics of people like Leszek Kołakowski and Milovan Djilas symbols of the tragedy of the Old Left, and farce in figures like Eldridge Cleaver, then in Hitchens I personally find the surrealism of the politics that started sometime in the 1970s. From an interview in Radar on the occassion of his naturalization:

You’ve lived in this country since 1981. Why did you recently decide to become an American citizen? Why did I do it?

It was a post-September 11th feeling. I realized that I’ve been living here a long time and that this country, this society, had been pretty welcoming to me. I was just cruising along with a green card and felt like I was cheating on my dues.

And if you want to argue for war, you do it in two ways: One is to argue there is a war, which I think everyone believes, and the other is that we should be fighting in it, which means advocating in public that people go to Iraq or Afghanistan. I felt I probably ought to be a citizen for that.

Now that you’re able to vote in the next presidential election, are you going to register for a particular political party?

No. I don’t have any party allegiances. Before I could vote, I wrote in a column that I was for the re-election of George Bush, Sr. That was the first time I ever wrote or said in public who I was for. If George Bush, Sr., had that second term, I think we would be living in a better world in lots of ways. One of which would have been, we never would have elected George Bush, Jr. People forget that. People who always vote Democratic don’t realize that if they didn’t want this George Bush they should have voted for the last. They think of it as zero-sum: You’re either an elephant or a donkey. I hate the whole mentality. It produces boring parties and bad politicians. I’ve never been a supporter of either party in America. My line is that I dislike the Republicans, but I despise the Democrats.

There is no doubt that some works that exalt authority over freedom, hatred over tolerance and the strong over the weak can be good or even great art – the writings of Nietzsche, for example, of Hamsun and Céline. But that is not because of their formal achievement alone. It is because they also examine the ideals they express; because they include at least some self-criticism and reflection. The problem with Leni Riefenstahl’s films – and with her photographs too, most famously of the Nuba people of Sudan – is that they contain no such reflection. They exalt beauty and strength, and a simplified notion of nobility, and that is all. They are, therefore, not art, but propaganda – superb propaganda, technically innovative propaganda, but propaganda all the same. They misrepresent the reality of Nazi power, and Nuba life, showing only a glittering, manipulated surface, not the complex and (in the case of the Nazis) horrifyingly costly truth. Art is about more than beauty, as Susan Sontag said. Leni Riefenstahl ‘had a flair for the stunning image and the histrionic episode’, Bach writes, but none for any human feeling or truth. He quotes Thomas Mann: ‘art is moral in that it awakens’, while ‘Leni’s art lulled and deceived’. Leni Riefenstahl was not an artist, but a gifted propagandist for an evil cause. That is Bach’s conclusion. His will probably be the definitive biography. I certainly hope so.

more from Literary Review here.

When did teenage angst and arrogance begin? Many baby boomers, still fighting over the legacy of the 1960s as they lurch toward retirement, think of themselves as products of the rock ’n’ roll rebellion that shattered the bourgeois proprieties of the 1950s. Chronicled in song and witnessed by the new electronic media, the impudent saga of the ’60s counterculture seemed unique.

Jon Savage’s massive new book, “Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture,” provides the prequel. There has in fact been wave after wave of youthful defiance — Savage begins his study in the 19th century — whether idealistic or hedonistic or both. The author of “England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond,” Savage seems more at home with popular culture than with the fine arts. Hence the material in “Teenage” on ragtime, swing and the movies is stronger than that on modernist painters and poets.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From The New York Times:

THE JOY OF DRINKING by Barbara Holland:

Holland slowly savors what E. B. White called, in that genteel New Yorker way, “the golden companionship of the tavern.” She notes that “in a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or,” God help us all, “the Red Sox.” And she knows that “to extract the fullest flavor of our drinking house, we needed to spend serious evening time there, slowly coming to know the bartender and the regulars, their joys and sorrows.” But becoming a “regular” isn’t as easy as “Cheers” may have made it seem; a decent bar’s culture is tough to crack.

Coffeehouses, it must be admitted, have often vied with bars for our affections. In Shakespeare’s day, Holland writes, “coffeehouses sprang up to challenge the taverns. The authorities were suspicious of the whole thing and sent spies to eavesdrop. In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.

More here.

From Edge:

When it comes to creatures living in the oceans, I, like most people, have always been enthralled by the popular favorites such as whales, polar bears and sea otters. It takes a special person to appreciate that there is just as much wonder to be found in the ocean’s smallest and humblest organic forms—the microbes, genes and proteins without which the more charismatic creatures wouldn’t exist at all.

J. Craig Venter, 60, a former National Institutes of Health physiologist, who led the effort to sequence and publish the human genome in 2001, is one such person. Through the institute that bears his name, he is sponsoring the second of two global expeditions by the research ship Sorcerer II to sample microbes and proteins throughout the world’s oceans and seas.

The Sorcerer II’s journeys have so far yielded a database of 6.3 million genetic base pairs and 1,700 new families of proteins, not to mention 150 new species of microbes in waters off Bermuda that were once considered a biological desert—and the searching and counting is nowhere near complete.

More here.

Douglas McGray in Wired:

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world — the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

McKinsey wanted to know if the developer, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation, could bring businesses to the island without messing up thet bird habitat. The consultants thought Gutierrez’s firm could figure it out. Gutierrez, an architect and urban designer for engineering and design giant Arup, didn’t know anything about birds. But he was a veteran of several big-city design projects in his native Chile and something of a young star at Arup’s London headquarters. The scope of the idea awed him. A whole new city? Were they serious? More important, could Arup get in on it? He quickly caught a flight to Shanghai.

Today Gutierrez and a team of Arup specialists from Europe, North America, and Asia are finalizing a plan for a scratch- built metropolis called Dongtan. Anywhere else in the world, it would have been a thought exercise, done up pretty for a design book or a museum show. But Shanghai’s economy is growing three times faster than the US economy did at the height of the dotcom boom. More than 2,000 high-rises have gone up within city limits in the past decade. The city’s most famous stretch of skyline, including the jewel-box-like Jin Mao Tower and the purple rocket-shaped Pearl TV Tower, was a rice paddy just 20 years ago. Now some 130 million people live within a two and a half hour drive of downtown. Even the wild ideas get built here.

More here.

Laura Moorhead in Wired:

“Design like you give a damn.” That’s the signature line in the rousing stump speech often delivered by Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity. While others build luxe lofts and titanium-plated monoliths, Sinclair and fellow cofounder Kate Stohr use architecture to solve social and humanitarian problems. Since starting the nonprofit in 1999, Sinclair, a 32-year-old London-born architect, and Stohr, a 32-year-old American journalist, have led 30 projects in six countries. They’ve organized design competitions for refugee housing in Kosovo, mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, and a soccer clubhouse in South Africa that doubles as an HIV/AIDS outreach center.

More here.

Review of the book “Design Like You Give a Damn” here.

Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. The motto of his group, Architecture for Humanity, is “Design like you give a damn.” Using a litany of striking examples, he shows how AFH has helped find creative solutions to humanitarian crises all over the globe. Sinclair then outlines his TED Prize wish: to create a global open-source network that will let architects and communities share and build designs to house the world.

Watch video here.

Jacob Hale Russell & John Jurgensen in The Wall Street Journal:

Paul Henry Smith, a conductor who studied as a teen under Leonard Bernstein, hopes to pull off an ambitious performance next year: conducting three Beethoven symphonies back-to-back in a live concert. “Doing Beethoven’s symphonies is how you prove your mettle,” he says.

But Mr. Smith’s proof comes with the help of a computerized baton. He will use it to lead an “orchestra” with no musicians — the product of a computer program designed by a former Vienna Philharmonic cellist and comprised of over a million recorded notes played by top musicians. …

Even some experts now find it hard to tell the difference. At the request of a Wall Street Journal reporter, David Liptak, chair of the composition department at the Eastman School of Music, listened to a 30-second passage of a Beethoven symphony created on a computer, as well as three versions recorded by live orchestras. On his first try at identifying the computerized version, Mr. Liptak guessed wrong. He says the difference became clear when he heard a longer clip (listen to the four sample passages).

More here.

Alison Gopnik at Slate:

A few months ago, a construction worker named Wesley Autrey leapt in front of a moving subway train in New York City to save a stranger who had just collapsed onto the tracks. Five days later, the New York Times speculated that this act of apparent altruism—”I just saw someone who needed help,” Autrey said—might be explained by a bunch of cells thought to exist in the human brain, called mirror neurons. …

Mirror neurons have become the “left brain/right brain” of the 21^st century. The idea that these cells could make a hero out of Wesley Autrey began with a genuine and important discovery about the brains of macaque monkeys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists found a population of cells that fired whenever a monkey prepared to act but also when it watched another animal act. They called these cells “mirror neurons.” It didn’t take long for scientists and science writers to speculate that mirror neurons might serve as the physiological basis for a wide range of social behaviors, from altruism to art appreciation. Headlines like “Cells That Read Minds” or “How Brain’s ‘Mirrors’ Aid Our Social Understanding” tapped into our intuitions about connectedness. Maybe this cell, with its mellifluous name, gives us our special capacity to understand one another—to care, to learn, and to communicate. Could mirror neurons be responsible for human language, culture, empathy, and morality?

More here.

Amy Crawford in Smithsonian Magazine:

“During Derby Week, Louisville is the capital of the world,” wrote John Steinbeck in 1956. “The Kentucky Derby, whatever it is—a race, an emotion, a turbulence, an explosion—is one of the most beautiful and violent and satisfying things I have ever experienced.”

For generations, crowds have herded to Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville on the first Saturday in May, with millions more tuning in to live television coverage. The Kentucky Derby, a 1-¼ mile race for 3-year-old Thoroughbred horses, is the longest continually held sporting event in the United States—the horses have run without interruption since 1875, even during both World Wars.

But for its first few decades, says Jay Ferguson, a curator at Louisville’s Kentucky Derby Museum, “the Derby wasn’t the horserace. Back around the turn of the century there were three horses in the race, and Churchill Downs had been losing money for every year it had been in existence.” It took savvy marketing, movie stars, southern tradition and luck to turn what could have been just another horse race into what many have called “the most exciting two minutes in sports.”

More here.

Joshua Roebke in Seed Magazine:

What is truth? How do we recognize it? Truth is a concept with which we are all pretty familiar. It is an undercurrent in every conversation and interaction we have with one another. Yet few of us ever give it much conscious thought except when we believe it is absent or in doubt. It’s one of those intangibles that, when it does come up, we typically speak of only in absolutes. A statement can be either true or false, and that is all.

Even when we do think about truth and admit to blends of gray between the black and white, we frequently have a sense that a true answer merely exists beyond our immediate grasp. Given sufficient information and time, we could all eventually figure out the veracity of any claim or idea. In the meantime, most of us are satisfied with our hunches. We have a gut feeling for what is correct and proceed with our lives content in our beliefs.

Part of the reason for our satisfaction probably stems from the difference between what we say is “true” and what we consider to be “truth.” The distinction isn’t just semantic nitpicking. “True” is what we say of a statement we agree with or believe in. “Truth” is a far more nebulous and fundamental concept. We understand it as more of an ideal toward which we strive, rather than one we hold any dominion over.

More here.

How government-sponsored groups masquerade as civil society.

Moisés Naím in Foreign Policy (via OliviaB):

The Myanmar Women’s Affairs Federation is a gongo. So is Nashi, a Russian youth group, and the Sudanese Human Rights Organization. Saudi Arabia’s International Islamic Relief Organization is also a gongo, as is Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. Gongos are everywhere, in China, Cuba, France, Tunisia, and even the United States.

Gongos are government-sponsored nongovernmental organizations. Behind this contradictory and almost laughable tongue twister lies an important and growing global trend that deserves more scrutiny: governments funding and controlling nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), often stealthily. Some gongos are benign, others irrelevant. But many, including those mentioned above, are dangerous. Some act as the thuggish arm of repressive governments. Others use the practices of democracy to subtly undermine democracy at home. Abroad, the gongos of repressive regimes lobby the United Nations and other international institutions, often posing as representatives of citizen groups with lofty aims when, in fact, they are nothing but agents of the governments that fund them. Some governments embed their gongos deep in the societies of other countries and use them to advance their interests abroad.

More here.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, how many honorary degrees separate George W. Bush from other, controversial leaders? In Foreign Policy:

In June of 1975, the Allahabad High Court in India found Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of using the state appartus to win the 1971 elections. The Gandhian socialist JP Narayan agitated against the Prime Minister and mobilized mass protests against the government. In response to the Court and popular agitations, the Prime Minister declared a State of Emergency, began cracking down on civil liberties and opposition parties on the right, left and center, and brought Indian democracy to a halt. (That apparent admirer of the vile, vile Enver Hohxa, Mother Teresa, supported this new Indian dictatorship.) The Emergency ended 20 months after it was declared with new, fair elections. The resistance to the Emergency is taken to be a sign of the resilience of Indian electoral democracy. Now an Indian historian, Ramachandra Guha, argues that JP Narayan and the opposition to Gandhi are also to blame for the suspension of India’s democracy. In Outlook India:

In your Emergency chapter, you say that JP and Indira Gandhi wrote the script for the Emergency together, which suggests a kind of equivalence between their actions.

In a sense. Because Mrs Gandhi had the instruments of state at her command and because she grossly abused them through the Emergency, she would be the greater culprit. But one can’t let JP off the hook either. One placed too much faith in the state, and the other placed too little faith in the state and in representative institutions. One said I am Parliament, I am India, the other said disband Parliament…

You strongly suggest that the single biggest reason for Indira Gandhi calling elections in 1977 was western criticism of her and the Emergency. That’s interesting..

Yes, I do argue that. There are other reasons, too, but this is something no one has said before, and I have documented it, from the private letters by Horace Alexander, and public criticism by Fenner Brockway and John Grigg. Horace Alexander taught Indira Gandhi bird-watching. He was a Quaker, an emissary between Gandhi and the Raj. Fenner Brockway was a very important socialist and a very close friend of Nehru.

MONROVIA, Liberia—Jonathan Koffa, known to his fans as Takun J, wore fake diamond earrings and a rhinestone-studded D&G necklace that was missing most of its bling. One day in March, he and several other Liberian rappers gathered around a plastic table next to a blazing strip of asphalt in downtown Monrovia. Only a flimsy umbrella separated us from the punishing midday sun, and the musicians sweated into their do-rags.

They were members of L.I.B. Records, one of Liberia’s most popular rap outfits, which is not a record label in the traditional sense but a group of like-minded artists who sometimes perform together. Unlike the American rappers they admired—50 Cent, DMX, Jay-Z—their lives lacked any hint of glamour. Most were in their 20s and lived at home. They walked everywhere, because in Liberia, even a rapper with three simultaneous radio hits couldn’t afford a bicycle. On nights when he ran out of food, Takun J told me that he ate hot cereal with sugar before bed, just to have something in his stomach.

more from Slate here.

David Brooks was delighted by the response he received when he popped the Reinhold Niebuhr question to Barack Obama a week or so ago. “I love him.” Obama said. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” Needless to say, Brooks was impressed. “So I asked, What do you take away from him?”

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

more from TNR here.

‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, she seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

more from the LRB here.

From Science:

Researchers have used a new gene-hunting technique to pinpoint a novel genetic variant that raises some people’s odds of having a heart attack. The results, reported online today in Science, suggest a possible new contributor to heart disease and could lead to a genetic test to pinpoint people who are susceptible. Over the past decade, many genes have been reported to increase the risk of heart disease, but few of these findings have held up in subsequent studies. They found a genetic variant on chromosome 9 that was much more common in people who had suffered a heart attack. They and U.S. collaborators then confirmed the association in another Iceland sample and three U.S. groups totaling nearly 4600 cases and 12,800 controls.

A separate team found the same genetic clue. Researchers led by Ruth McPherson of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute in Canada and Jonathan Cohen of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas examined about 300 heart disease patients and 300 controls using 100,000 markers. The results, which point to the same gene on chromosome 9 fingered by deCODE, held up in five more groups of people in the U.S. and Denmark. Given that two separate teams found evidence for the same variant in a large number of sick people, “one can be absolutely confident that this risk allele is real,” says McPherson.

The results could eventually help doctors predict which individuals are prone to heart problems.

More here.