Charles Elliott reviews The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord, in Literary Review:

Around two thousand years ago, a Greek doctor named Dioscorides described a plant that he considered to be medically useful. It was called ‘crocodilium’, he said, and it was supposed to help people who were splenetic. When boiled and drunk, it ’causes copious bleeding at the nose’. Other characteristics, apart from the shape of its roots and seeds, and the fact that it grew in ‘wooded places’, were unfortunately obscure.

What exactly was crocodilium? And why should anyone care? As Anna Pavord splendidly makes plain in this elegant and scholarly history of taxonomy, a science usually regarded as even dismaller than economics, such questions are far from insignificant. Exactly which plant is which, and what its relationship is to other plants, are matters central to our understanding of the world we live in. Crocodilium is a case in point, though on the whole a depressing one. The confusion surrounding it, as with so many of the plants mentioned by Dioscorides, lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years. Even when the sixteenth-century Italian botanist Luca Ghini finally managed to pin it down as being most likely a species of Eryngium (at the same time apologising for not drinking an infusion to see whether it really did make his nose bleed), he was taking only a modest step out of the chaos.

More here.

T. A. Frank in The New Republic:

The outposts of tyranny have enjoyed a tranquil holiday season, with a number expressing excitement for the new year and a few offering enthusiasm for Christmas. (Hanukkah received limited attention.) Even during the holidays, however, the patterns of daily life were able to continue: Americans were denounced, heads of state were feted, and landslide reelections were prepared. All in all, a time for rest and contemplation, as outpost leaders work to ensure that 2006 (barring violent uprising, economic meltdown, or war) will be exactly the same as 2005.

Country-by-country report here.

From Ego:

“The knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton has never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.” – Aldous Huxley

Myth #1: Aging is natural and so we shouldn’t fight it: First of all, aging is not universal. A number of complex species such as lobsters, rockfishes, some tortoises, etc. do not appear to age. Therefore, aging is not a prerequisite to life. Aging is neither inevitable nor universal. Secondly, humankind is, in a sense, a struggle against nature. We have antibiotics and vaccines because we don’t want to be sick, which would be the natural outcome for many of us. If we were to follow Nature’s will, many of us wouldn’t be here and wouldn’t be reading these lines, on a monitor, over the Internet.

Myth #2: What’s the point of extending life if we are old: This is a common misconception about research on the biology of aging. The ultimate goal of my work and that of many biogerontologists is to preserve health and life. Yet we aim not just to make elderly people live longer but to diminish, not extend, age-related debilitation (also see de Grey et al., 2002). What we want is to find ways to extend healthy life span by postponing disease and eventually eradicate all forms of age-related involution. In other words, to find a cure for aging, an intervention that permits us to avoid aging and all pathologies associated with it. Instead of improving the quality of life of the elderly, I want to avoid having elderly patients in the first place. People would still die from accidents, infectious diseases, etc. After all, children and teenagers die too even though they are not yet aged.

My calculations for a cure for aging yield an average longevity of 1,200 years. This is assuming one would be forever young in body and mind.

More here.

From MSNBC:

For female guppies, there’s more to life than making babies. A new study finds that guppies experience menopause just like humans and other animals. The study is the first demonstration of menopause in fish and raises the question of why some female animals live beyond their fertile years at all. It was previously thought that fish don’t experience menopause because they produce eggs throughout their entire lives. Birds and mammals, in contrast, have a finite number of eggs that they are born with.

Guppies typically reproduce about every 30 days and lay eggs approximately 20 times throughout their lives. The researchers found that as female guppies aged, they began to skip litters or even stop reproducing for extended periods of time, effectively ceasing to reproduce after a certain age. In other words, the guppies were going through a fish version of menopause.

More here.

From Salon (via Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance):

When we asked him what he was reading, he sighed and mentioned a book on the economic wars of the future, author and title unknown to me.

“Better to read ‘Don Quixote,'” I said to him. “Everything’s in there.” Now, the ‘Quixote’ is a book that is not read nearly as much as is claimed, although very few will admit to not having read it. With two or three quotes, Clinton showed that he knew it very well indeed. Responding, he asked us what our favorite books were. Styron said his was “Huckleberry Finn.”

I would have said “Oedipus Rex,” which has been my bed table book for the last 20 years, but I named “The Count of Monte Cristo,” mainly for reasons of technique, which I had some trouble explaining.

Clinton said his was the “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to “Absalom, Absalom,” Faulkner’s stellar novel, no question, although others would choose “Light in August” for purely personal reasons. Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji’s monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from “The Sound and the Fury.”

More here.  In the comments to Sean’s post at Cosmic Variance, a reader says the following:

I once wrote President Clinton about the books that most influenced his growing up and as president. He wrote back and included a list of 21 books that he felt really had an impact on him. They included:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
Lincoln by David Donald
One Hundred Years of Solitude by G.G. Marquez
Politics as a Vocation by Max Weber
The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quigley
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch
Living History by Hillary Clinton
The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilzations to the Eve of the 21st Century by David Fromkin
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes by Seamus Heaney
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Herois in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas Kempis
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics by Reinhold Niebuhr
Home to Catalonia by George Orwell
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats by W.B. Yeats

Thanks for sharing this list, Cameron!

From Kottke.org:

Banksy Hits New York’s Most Famous Museums. The installation of unauthorized art into some of the top museums in NYC.

Dot-Con Job. A Seattle Times investigation into InfoSpace, a high-flying dot com that bilked investors out of millions.

13 things that do not make sense. A list of open scientific questions.

Life on the Scales. About the quarter-power scaling laws.

More here.  And here are the runners up:

Bad to the Last Drop. On bottled water.

Why do McDonald’s customers order smaller Cokes at the drive-thru window?

Grim Meathook Future.

Not a Word. About intentional fake words in dictionaries.

Six Feet Under, 2001-2005

Being Poor

10 Reasons to Eat Local Food.

Redemption. The NY Yankees and redemption.

My Outsourced Life. A.J. Jacobs outsources his life to India.

More here.  [NOTE: the penultimate link is to an essay by Jed Palmer at 3QD!]

Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books:

In 2005 I heard that Coalition forces were camped in the ruins of Babylon. I heard that bulldozers had dug trenches through the site and cleared areas for helicopter landing pads and parking lots, that thousands of sandbags had been filled with dirt and archaeological fragments, that a 2600-year-old brick pavement had been crushed by tanks, and that the moulded bricks of dragons had been gouged out from the Ishtar Gate by soldiers collecting souvenirs. I heard that the ruins of the Sumerian cities of Umma, Umm al-Akareb, Larsa and Tello were completely destroyed and were now landscapes of craters.

I heard that the US was planning an embassy in Baghdad that would cost $1.5 billion, as expensive as the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, the proposed tallest building in the world.

I saw a headline in the Los Angeles Times that read: ‘After Levelling City, US Tries to Build Trust.’

I heard that military personnel were now carrying ‘talking point’ cards with phrases such as: ‘We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’

I heard that 47 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11 and 44 per cent believed that the hijackers were Iraqi; 61 per cent thought that Saddam had been a serious threat to the US and 76 per cent said the Iraqis were now better off.

Much more here.

Eric Reeves in The New Republic:

One reason is that there is no real international pressure on the architects of the genocide–the National Islamic Front security cabal in Khartoum–to bring the killing to a halt. On the contrary, as the genocide enters its fourth year, the international community continues to defer to Khartoum, or even to suggest disingenuously that the regime has somehow reformed itself. Either way, the clear implication is that the lives of Darfur’s civilians are not worth the diplomatic price of confronting Sudan’s brutal leaders.

There is no more appalling illustration of this phenomenon than recent announcements by the African Union and the Arab League that both groups will hold their upcoming summits in Khartoum. These summits will represent symbolic triumphs for Sudan’s genocidaires. And they will reinforce in very public fashion what Khartoum already knows: that none of its neighbors really cares what it does in Darfur.

More here.

Jesse Walker in Reason Online:

The Los Angeles Times reports that creationists have been buying roadside dinosaur parks around the country and turning them into anti-evolution museums. Visit the Cabazon Dinosaurs today, and you can pick up Darwin-bashing literature at the gift shop; at similar attractions you’ll see the evidence, such as it is, that dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden and were transformed from vegetarians to carnivores by man’s original sin. “Go to Disneyland, they teach evolution,” the evangelist Kent Hovind of Pensacola’s Dinosaur Adventure Land complains to the Times. “It’s subtle—signs that say, ‘Millions of years ago.’ This is a golden opportunity to get our point across.”

More here.

Ivars Peterson in Science News Online:

In recent times, mathematicians have demonstrated the usefulness of computer graphics for visualizing geometric forms. With a remarkable ability to convert equations into colorful, evocative images on a screen, computers now play an important role in communicating ideas, discovering patterns, and suggesting new conjectures worth testing.

Standard computer graphics by itself, however, doesn’t do justice to three-dimensional forms. Fortunately, new technologies have made it possible to create 3D models of geometric shapes, magically transforming equations into elegant, intriguing miniatures.

“Many mathematicians consider models valuable for building intuition and for communicating mathematical ideas to students and to the public,” George W. Hart of SUNY at Stony Brook writes in the current issue of the Mathematical Intelligencer. “Nothing can substitute for the visual and tactile pleasure of handling a model, spinning it in one’s hand, comparing it to another model in the other hand.”

More here.

Adam Kirsch reviews The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew Stewart, in the New York Sun:

“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been,” Nietzsche wrote in “Beyond Good and Evil”: “a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” In “The Courtier and the Heretic” (W.W. Norton, 320 pages, $25.95), Matthew Stewart takes Nietzsche’s principle to its logical conclusion. If what really matters about a philosophy is the personal experience behind it, then it makes sense to be curious about that experience. What private and public events, what cultural and religious influences, made a thinker think the way he did? In this double study of Spinoza and Leibniz, accordingly, Mr. Stewart focuses less on their philosophy than on what he calls their “philosophy of philosophy,” examining how their utterly different lives defined the purpose and style of their work.

Mr. Stewart’s decision to pair Spinoza and Leibniz allows his biographical method to shine. These two men, who met only once over a few days in 1676, divided the empire of European thought between them, and they could not have ruled their provinces more differently.

More here.  [Leibniz on left, Spinoza on right.]

Matt Bradley in the Christian Science Monitor:

Frustrated by what he sees as the news media’s sensationalist perspectives and art’s sometimes idealistic and impractical approach to effecting social change, Mr. Günther was prompted to devise an innovative medium to remedy his disenchantment.

The result is “World Processor,” a series of custom-made acrylic globes with individually manipulated surfaces that convey a diverse range of information and data in a colorful way. The project combines elements of journalism and art to provide a thought-provoking perspective on global issues ranging from nuclear testing sites to international trade.

More here.  [On the globe shown, TV ownership in a nation is indicated by the size of the screen.]

From despardes:

Mehreen Jabbar is a Pakistani woman filmmaker, director, who moved to New York from Karachi. Much of Mehreen’s work has focused on the everyday lives of average Pakistani women and the conflicts they experience from day to day. While other directors have created fine plays which are obvious in their attempts to raise awareness of women’s rights, Mehreen enjoys the challenge of applying subtlety to get her message across. Her tele-film, “Putli Ghar”’ (Puppet House), is an example of such work. It is a story of two young couples living in the same building. The film focuses on the friendship that develops between the two wives; one, a naïve newlywed, and the other, who has been married for a while, more set in her ways, and enjoys making puppets. As the friendship between the two women grows, the bizarre relationship between the puppet maker and her husband is slowly revealed to the naïve friend resulting in adverse effects on her own relationship with her husband. Another tele-film “Farar” (Escape) is about three friends, a widow, a working woman, and a third woman who is a student of classical dance. The play shows the struggle of each woman to sort out her life and find a unique identity for herself.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Confounding all expectations, the Booker judges leave Ian McEwan off the shortlist but Zadie Smith, who does win a coveted place, vents some spleen about an England populated by “aspirational arseholes” in an American magazine. Penguin later issues a statement in which Smith professes her deep love for her home country.

The Man Booker international prize announces an inaugral shortlist of literary big-hitters, including Saul Bellow, Doris Lessing and Gunter Grass. The news from the libraries is that Jacqueline Wilson is, once again, the most borrowed author, and there’s further good news for the Tracy Beaker author: her publisher, Random House, announce that they have sold 20m of her titles. Finally, the prize for oddity of the month goes to the story that Hemingway’s former neighbours want to buy the house in which he shot himself in order to move it down the road.

More here.

Alex Lencicki at Brokentype:

My coworker Francis wrote a book called the Holy Tango of Literature. In it, he made anagrams of the names of famous poets, and then wrote poems based on the anagrams in the poet’s style. The book includes Emily Dickenson’s “Skinny Domicile”, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Errol Flynn’s not Dead”, and William Shakespeare’s “Is Sperm Like a Whale?”

Here’s William Carlos Williams

I WILL ALARM ISLAMIC OWLS

I will be alarming
the Islamic owls
that are in
the barn

and which
you warned me
are very jittery
and susceptible to loud noises

Forgive me
they see so well in the dark
so feathery
and so dedicated to Allah.

Which is several grades of awesome.

More here.

Kenneth Brown reports on the 21st Haifa International Film Festival, in Le Monde Diplomatique (English ed.).

Haifa is Israel’s only remaining large, mixed, Jewish-Palestinian city. Of its population of 250,000 at least 10% are Arabs; the figure jumps to 30% for students at the University of Haifa. (Of Israel’s overall population of 6.7 million, about 1.3 million are Arabs, 19.4% of the total.) Haifa prides itself on this coexistence, real or imagined, between Arab and Jew. The novelist Emile Habibi (1), the city’s best-known Palestinian, believed the Arabs who remained in Haifa after the war of 1948 could live with Jews in relative tranquillity provided they stayed in their place: that place is geographically and symbolically at the city’s lowest level. Habibi, who died in his beloved city in May 1996, left his mark indelibly on the consciousness of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis. Engraved on his tombstone are the words “Still in Haifa”. A cunning, sad, brilliant writer, he received the Israeli prize for his literary work in 1992. He gave the prize money to the child victims of the first intifada.

At the time of this year’s film festival, Haifa was also celebrating the centenary of the Hijaz railway opened by the Ottoman emperor. The railway ran to Damascus and on to Mecca. It was meant to transport wheat and barley from the interior of Syria to Haifa and, in the other direction, pilgrims arriving by ship from the Maghreb, bound for Mecca, south to the Hijaz. The railway marked the beginnings of the transformation of a small Ottoman town into a modern city.

From National Geographic:

Gas Thief Escapes on Tricycle:

Speeding from the scene of the crime, a Chinese boy tows a floating plastic bag of stolen natural gas in early August. Flouting a government ban, farmers around the central Chinese town of Pucheng frequently filch gas from the local oil field.

More here.

From Scientific American:

2005 has been a year of tempests both literal and figurative. Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma led a record pack of devastating storms; the issue of whether to teach intelligent design in the classroom went to trial; the decision about whether to make “Plan B” emergency contraception available over the counter was postponed; a celebrated stem cell researcher was revealed as a fraud; and the threat of avian flu loomed large.

But there were exhilarating developments as well. Long believed extinct, the ivory-billed woodpecker was detected in the Big Woods of Arkansas; astronomers discovered a tenth planet in our solar system–complete with its own moon; physicists created a new state of matter using quarks and gluons; and the genome of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, was sequenced.

More here.

From a review of The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy in The Economist:

Close behind the news headlines lurk abstract puzzles. Freedom and democracy are offered up as justifications for war, yet they themselves are rarely explained or justified. People argue passionately about abortion, uncertain where law and morals meet or what anchors moral convictions. A judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, faced by Christian zealots claiming that evolution is “just a theory”, asks experts to explain what makes theories scientific.

Puzzles are all very well. But arguments have to end. When arguments themselves turn on contentious principles—majority rule, moral truth, science against faith—philosophy will not go away. Shut the door, and back it comes through the window. Philosophy, once readmitted, then turns a characteristic trick. It makes you think how you should be arguing about those principles and tries to make plain what should count as good and bad reasons. It guarantees no answers but does offer the wherewithal to recognise genuine answers when they appear.

More here.

Paul Trachtman in Smithsonian Magazine:

Paul Cézanne wanted to make paint bleed. The old masters, he told the poet Joachim Gasquet, painted warmblooded flesh and made sap run in their trees, and he would too. He wanted to capture “the green odor” of his Provence fields and “the perfume of marble from Saint-Victoire,” the mountain that was the subject of so many of his paintings. He was bold, scraping and slapping paint onto his still lifes with a palette knife. “I will astonish Paris with an apple, ” he boasted.

In the years when his friends Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Renoir were finally gaining acceptance, Cézanne worked mostly in isolation, ridiculed by critics and mocked by the public, sometimes ripping up his own canvases. He wanted more than the quick impressions of the Impressionists (nature, he wrote to a fellow artist, “is more depth than surface”) and devoted himself to studying the natural world. “It’s awful for me,” he told a young friend, “my eyes stay riveted to the tree trunk, to the clod of earth. It’s painful for me to tear them away.” He could often be found, according to one contemporary, “on the outskirts of Paris wandering about the hillsides in jackboots. As no one took the least interest in his pictures, he left them in the fields.”

More here.