Carl Zimmer reviews climate change books by Tim Flannery and Elizabeth Kolbert in the New York Times Book Review:

It would be hard to imagine a better time for these two important books to appear. The science of global warming has been making dramatic headlines. NASA scientists recently reported that 2005 was the hottest year on record. Researchers studying the oldest core of Greenland ice yet extracted have also reported that there is more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than at any other point in the past 650,000 years. The vast majority of climate scientists agree that if we continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the world’s temperature will climb significantly, and new computer models project a grim scenario of droughts and rising sea levels. Global warming is a fiendishly complex scientific puzzle, and “The Weather Makers” and “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” help show how the individual pieces fit together into a worrying whole.

It’s also a fiendishly complex political puzzle, and there may not be much time to decide how to act. Some leading climate scientists warn that we might be as few as 20 years away from a “tipping point,” after which it will be too late to reverse catastrophic change. Yet so far such warnings have not led to much meaningful action. The Bush administration proposes cutting carbon emissions by investing in hybrid cars and other futuristic technologies. Meanwhile, many of the nations that signed the Kyoto Protocols are failing to meet their own targets.

More here.

Lee Siegel in the New York Times:

Amid all the justified, and long overdue, concern about truth in memoir — and in nonfiction books generally — a peculiar condition of American literary culture has been overlooked: a radical mistrust of generalization reigns. This is especially the case at magazines and newspapers, wheresweeping statements, speculation and intuitive leaps have long been suppressed. And now, in the wake of the James Frey affair, Oprah Winfrey and others are calling for publishers to verify the factual accuracy of their books. Let us, then, put the question of written accuracy in perspective. Let us imagine for a moment what Western intellectual history would be like if the awesome figure of The Fact-Checker had stood astride culture from (almost) the beginning. . . .

Dear Yahweh,

First, congratulations from all of us here at The Jerusalemite on Saul of Tarsus’ selection of “Genesis” for his book club. This is huge. We just have a few queries about “Exodus” before it goes to press:

p. 12: “and the waters were divided.” Could we say: “apparently the sea was at very low tide that day”? Also, would Y-u please just take a look at Y–r notes again and make sure this really happened?

More here.

Michael Kinsley in Slate:

Editor’s note: Penguin Press is reportedly paying $8.5 million for the memoirs of former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan. During 18 years at the Fed, until his retirement in January, Greenspan captivated Washington and the world with his pronouncements about the economy, delivered in a style that came to be known as “oracular obscurity.” According to the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom—no mean practitioner himself, according to some observers—”Oracular obscurity combines the spoken traditions of Homer and Shakespeare with the writing style of postwar French pomposité grandiloquente and just a dash of Latin American magic realism to produce and entirely new phenomenon that has reinvented congressional testimony as a literary genre.” But experts say it is not clear how well the oracular-obscurist style will adapt itself to the genre of autobiography. The book is due to be published in September of next year. According to publishing industry sources, Greenspan’s working title is Considerations. The publisher’s working title is, Is Your Money Supply Expanding, or Are You Just Happy To See Me? This column has obtained an early sample of the contents…

More here.

David Yezzi in The New Criterion:

Mr. Matthew Arnold. To him, Miss Mary Augusta, his niece: “Why, Uncle Matthew, oh why, will not you be always wholly serious?
—Max Beerbohm, in a caption

But why do you take everything I say so seriously?
—W. H. Auden to Stephen Spender

W. H. Auden collected hats, at least as a younger man (he subsequently renounced them). He had a workman’s cap that he picked up in Berlin and later consigned to the fireplace after throwing up into it, a panama hat that leant him the air of a lunatic vicar (his impersonation of which always brought the house down), and a mortarboard for his more donnish moods. In his biography from 1979 of the poet, Charles Osborne suggests that “there was a strong element of the poseur, the role-player, in the mature Auden.” This proclivity for assuming different guises extended not only to Auden’s choice of fancy dress but also to his weighing of intellectual matters: “He would adopt an attitude or an intellectual position,” Osborne writes, “sometimes in order to test his own ideas, at other times to goad a response out of someone else. His intellectual ebullience was such that he could present with equal force and conviction the opposing sides of an argument, and he frequently did so.” “He always tried things on for size,” his friend Christopher Isherwood once observed.

More here.

Bob Holmes in New Scientist:

The first humans may have arrived on Easter Island several centuries later than previously supposed, suggests a new study. If so, these Polynesian settlers must have begun destroying the island’s forests almost immediately after their arrival.

Easter Island has often been cited as the classic example of a human-induced ecological catastrophe. The island – one of the most remote places on Earth – was once richly forested, but settlers cut the forests, partly to use the wood in construction of the massive stone statues and temples for which the island is famous. When Dutch sailors arrived in 1722, they found a starving population on a barren island.

Archaeologists had thought that humans first arrived at the island around 800 AD, based on radiocarbon dating of kitchen scraps and cooking fires. Since the first signs of severe deforestation do not appear until the 13^th century, this suggests the Easter Islanders lived several centuries without serious impact on their environment.

Not so, says Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Hunt and Carl Lipo of California State University at Long Beach, US, radiocarbon-dated charcoal from the earliest human traces in a new excavation on the island. The site, Anakena, is Easter Island’s only sandy beach and has long been regarded as the likeliest spot for first colonists to settle. To their surprise, the wood dated no earlier than 1200 AD – several hundred years more recent than they had expected.

More here.

Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine:

Even today, most members of institutions like Harvard would instinctively endorse, in some form, the proposition advanced six centuries ago by the Italian Renaissance humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio: “We call those studies liberal, then, which are worthy of a free [liber] man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.” But today, every part of Vergerio’s confident creed is coming under increased attack. For one thing, “liberal studies” can appear less useful, to the student and to society as a whole, than concrete scientific and technical knowledge. Better to emerge from college as a budding biologist or financier, our practical-minded culture incessantly tells us, than as a mere reader of books. Meanwhile, the humanities themselves have become infinitely more self-critical in recent decades, so that “virtue” and “wisdom,” unproblematic terms for Vergerio, are now contested battlegrounds. Reading canonical texts, many people now believe, is not the road to freedom, but a subtle kind of indoctrination.

More here.

Ronald Dworkin in the New York Review of Books:

The British and most of the American press have been right, on balance, not to republish the Danish cartoons that millions of furious Muslims protested against in violent and terrible destruction around the world. Reprinting would very likely have meant—and could still mean—more people killed and more property destroyed. It would have caused many British and American Muslims great pain because they would have been told by other Muslims that the publication was intended to show contempt for their religion, and though that perception would in most cases have been inaccurate and unjustified, the pain would nevertheless have been genuine. True, readers and viewers who have been following the story might well have wanted to judge the cartoons’ impact, humor, and offensiveness for themselves, and the press might therefore have felt some responsibility to provide that opportunity. But the public does not have a right to read or see whatever it wants no matter what the cost, and the cartoons are in any case widely available on the Internet.

Sometimes the press’s self-censorship means the loss of significant information, argument, literature, or art, but not in this case.

More here.

Tim Folger in Discover Magazine:

In the heart of Las Vegas, amid the glitz and the ersatz versions of New York, Paris, and Luxor, stands a museum dedicated to the history of what must surely be humanity’s greatest gamble—that we could save the world from annihilation by building weapons of mass destruction. A city founded on fantasies and flimflam might seem an odd location for the Atomic Testing Museum, but more nuclear firepower has been unleashed in the desert near Las Vegas than anywhere else on Earth. From 1951 until a moratorium ended tests in 1992, the United States detonated at least 928 atomic weapons at what is now called the Nevada Test Site. More tests were probably conducted secretly. One hundred of the bombs exploded aboveground, including 23 that were more powerful than the bomb that razed Hiroshima.

There was no popular outcry when the U.S. government decided to test the country’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal just 65 miles northwest of the Las Vegas strip.  Quite the opposite. The residents of what in 1950 was a small town of 24,624 could not have been more thrilled. With chilling exuberance, Nevada’s governor Charles Russell boasted in 1952 that the desert was blooming with atoms. In fact, the atomic testing program provided a huge boost to the local economy.

More here.  [Photo shows “Miss Atomic Bomb” in a  mushroom cloud costume, 1957.]

Marc Ramirez in the Seattle Times:

…Ball and others like Pam Parham, who also worked the show, are professional interpreters who help deaf fans experience the power of live concerts, positioned between those fans and the stage.

The craft is harder than it sounds: At its best, it’s being prepared and knowledgeable enough to communicate the essence of an artist’s lyrics over the actual words. By law, venues must provide interpreters upon request. And while local ticket sellers report just a handful of requests a year — typically for big-name events — it’s been particularly busy for KeyArena, which has trotted out U2, McCartney and the Stones.

At Monday’s show, Bon Jovi himself had yet to take the stage. The crowd rippled with anticipation. You could see it play out in Ball’s face and hands, which bent and contorted as her body swayed to the music. With such help, “you feel like you’re part of it,” Kennedy says. “It’s like when you go to the movies — if the movie is captioned, you can enjoy it with everyone else.”

More here.

“Asia has too many boys. They can’t find wives, but they just might find extreme nationalism instead. It’s a dangerous imbalance for a region already on edge.”

Martin Walker in Foreign Policy:

The lost boys of Prof. Albert Macovski are upon us. Twenty years ago, the ultrasound scanning machine came into widespread use in Asia. The invention of Macovski, a Stanford University researcher, the device quickly gave pregnant women a cheap and readily available means to determine the sex of their unborn children. The results, by the million, are now coming to maturity in Bangladesh, China, India, and Taiwan. By choosing to give birth to males—and to abort females—millions of Asian parents have propelled the region into an extraordinary experiment in the social effects of gender imbalance.

Back in 1990, Nobel Prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen was one of the first to call attention to the phenomenon of an estimated 100 million “missing women” in Asia. Nearly everywhere else, women outnumber men, in Europe by 7 percent, and in North America by 3.4 percent. Concern now is shifting to the boys for whom these missing females might have provided mates as they reach the age that Shakespeare described as nothing but stealing and fighting and “getting of wenches with child.”

More here.

Rasha Abu Baker at CNN:

Imagine denying a Brit a pint or banning a Swede from a sauna.

Hard to contemplate. Yet many Middle Easterners in England are trying to come to terms with a new reality — life without the shisha.

The shisha, also known as a hookah, is a stand-up water pipe device often used to smoke flavored tobacco. It is one of the most favorite pastimes of Middle Easterners.

But it will all go up in smoke when a public ban on smoking comes into effect in June 2007.

Although people would still be able to enjoy the ancient habit at home, many feel it will never be the same.

More here.

From Commentary Mgazine:

The Beatles released Let It Be, the last of their thirteen albums, 36 years ago. Today there is no one musical group or soloist capable of commanding the attention paid to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr between 1964, when they first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and 1970, when McCartney announced that the group was disbanding. Just as there is no longer a common culture, so there is no longer a common style of music to which most English-speaking people listen. Written in a straightforwardly journalistic style, The Beatles: The Biography provides an exhaustive and generally reliable account of the bandmembers’ lives and careers up to 1970, and is of no small value as a study in what might be called the sociology of celebrity. But like most pop-music biographies, it has little of interest to say about the Beatles’ work; anyone in search of a thoughtful critical appraisal will find it unhelpful.

More here.

From The New York Times:

‘Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays,’ by David Foster Wallace. Review by PANKAJ MISHRA.

Reading David Foster Wallace’s new collection of magazine articles, you could be forgiven for thinking that the author of such defiantly experimental fictions as “Infinite Jest” (1996) and “Oblivion” (2004) has been an old-fashioned moralist in postmodern disguise all along. The grotesqueries of the 15th annual Adult Video News Awards, which Wallace writes about at considerable length here, present an easy target. And so, to a lesser extent, do the corruptions of English usage in America and the right-wing radio host John Ziegler. But Wallace poses an unsettling challenge to the way many of us live now when, while visiting the Maine Lobster Festival on behalf of Gourmet magazine, he asks if it is “all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure.”

More here.

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.