Jim Giles in Nature:

As debate rages in the United States over whether intelligent design should be taught in science classes, another topic that many researchers see as a pseudoscience is claiming scientific status within the British education system.

Over the past decade, several British universities have started offering bachelor of science (BSc) degrees in alternative medicine, including six that offer BSc degrees in homeopathy, a therapy in which the active ingredient is diluted so much that the dose given to the patient often does not contain even a single molecule of it. Some scientists are increasingly concerned that such courses give homeopathy and homeopaths undeserved scientific credibility, and they are campaigning to get the label removed (see Commentary, ‘Science degrees without the science‘).

More here.

This weekend is the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. In Signandsight.com, an interview with Jürgen Habermas on the EU and the political project of “Europe”.

What long-term goals should be pursued by the EU as a political body? Does your vision include a “United States of Europe” with a common government, citizenship, armed forces, etc.? What should Europe’s political structure look like 50 years from now?

[Habermas] A bold vision for 50 years down the line will not help us get on right now. I am content with a vision for the period leading up to the European elections in 2009. Those elections should be coupled with a Europe-wide referendum on three questions: whether the Union, beyond effective decision-making procedures, should have a directly elected president, its own foreign minister, and its own financial base. That is what Belgium’s Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt advocates. Such a proposal would pass muster if it won a “double majority” of EU member-states and of individual citizens’ votes. At the same time, the referendum would be binding only on those EU member-nations in which a majority of citizens had voted for the reforms. If the referendum were to succeed, it would mean the abandonment of the model of Europe as a convoy in which the slowest vehicle sets the pace for all. But even in a Europe consisting of a core and a periphery, those countries which prefer to remain on the periphery for the time being would of course retain the option of becoming part of the core at any time.

Via Majikthise:

Bob Hoover in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette:

“Finca Vigia” or Lookout Farm was the only house Hemingway owned outright. He bought it in 1940. From its full staff of servants to its secluded swimming pool, the “finca“ fitted Hemingway like his favorite “guayabera,” the traditional Cuban shirt.

The writer and his fourth wife, Mary, sailed from Cuba July 25, 1960, leaving behind the “silver, Venetian glassware, eight-thousand books … and Ernest’s small collection of paintings, one Paul Klee, two Juan Gris, five Andre Masson, one Braque …” along with 70 cats and at least nine dogs.

Hemingway never returned. He killed himself with a double-barreled shotgun blast July 2, 1961, at his other home, in Ketchum, Idaho.

The government of Cuba, however, refuses to let “Papa’s” presence on the island die. After appropriating the property in 1961, it continues to promote Hemingway as a cultural icon, casting him as a mythical figure on a level just below Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

More here.

Clive Thompson in Wired News:

If Tetris looked precisely like an IQ test, then maybe playing Tetris would help you do better at intelligence tests. Johnson spun this conceit into his brilliant book of last year, Everything Bad Is Good For You, in which he argued that video games actually make gamers smarter. With their byzantine key commands, obtuse rule-sets and dynamic simulations of everything from water physics to social networks, Johnson argued, video games require so much cognitive activity that they turn us into Baby Einsteins — not dull robots.

I loved the book, but it made me wonder: If games can inadvertently train your brain, why doesn’t someone make a game that does so intentionally?

I should have patented the idea. Next month, Nintendo is releasing Brain Age, a DS game based on the research of the Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Angelo, a London-born scientist in his early 30s with sandy brown hair, round wire-frame glasses and a slight, unobtrusive stammer, vividly recalls the day he began to hear voices. It was Jan. 7, 2001, and he had recently passed his Ph.D. oral exams in chemistry at an American university, where, for the previous four and a half years, he conducted research into infrared electromagnetism. Angelo was walking home from the laboratory when, all of a sudden, he heard two voices in his head. “It was like hearing thoughts in my mind that were not mine,” he explained recently. “They identified themselves as Andrew and Oliver, two angels. In my mind’s eye, I could see an image of a bald, middle-aged man dressed in white against a white background. This, I was told, was Oliver.” What the angels said, to Angelo’s horror, was that in the coming days, he would die of a brain hemorrhage. Terrified, Angelo hurried home and locked himself into his apartment. For three long days he waited out his fate, at which time his supervisor drove him to a local hospital, where Angelo was admitted to the psychiatric ward. It was his first time under psychiatric care. He had never heard voices before. His diagnosis was schizophrenia with depressive overtones.

For more than a half-century, auditory hallucinations have primarily been studied and discussed in terms of severe mental illness, most notably schizophrenia, and linked to bizarre delusions, disordered thought and emotional dissociation. Approximately 75 percent of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia hear voices, and for the majority the experience is overwhelmingly negative.

More here.

From Scientific American:

WHY BEAUTY IS TRUTH: A HISTORY OF SYMMETRY by Ian Stewart. The title of Ian Stewart’s book (he has written more than 60 others) is, of course, taken from the enigmatic last two lines of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”–that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. But what on earth did Keats mean? Stewart’s first 10 chapters, written in his usual easygoing style, constitute a veritable history of mathematics, with an emphasis on the concept of symmetry. When you perform an operation on a mathematical object, such that after the operation it looks the same, you have uncovered a symmetry.

Stewart concludes his book with two maxims. The first: “In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps.” The second: “In mathematics beauty must be true–because anything false is ugly.” I agree with the first statement, but not the second. We have seen how lovely proofs by Kempe and Dudeney were flawed. Moreover, there are simply stated theorems for which ugly proofs may be the only ones possible.

Because symmetry is the glue and tape that binds the pages of Stewart’s admirable history, a stanza from Lewis Carroll’s immortal nonsense ballad The Hunting of the Snark could serve as an epigraph for the book:

You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue:
You condense it with locusts and tape:
Still keeping one principal object in view–
To preserve its symmetrical shape.

More here.

“I want to look into myself, look at myself, delve into the assumptions I had going into the war,” he said. “Now it seems necessary to reflect on the society that has gotten itself into this mess. A question that looms more and more for me is: just what did 30 years of dictatorship do to 25 million people?”

“It’s not like I didn’t think about this,” he continued. “But nonetheless I allowed myself as an activist to put it aside in the hope that it could be worked through, or managed, or exorcised in a way that’s not as violent as is the case now. That did not work out.”

more from the NY Times here.

In the early 1970s, the American poet Larry Levis served as chauffeur and guide for Zbigniew Herbert when the Polish poet was teaching at a university in Los Angeles.

Only once, Herbert told Levis, had he ever driven a car, and that was during the war, after a clandestine meeting of the underground. Herbert found his driver shot in the head by the Nazis. To escape the same fate, he pushed the body aside and drove away.

“He said all this without any visible emotion. It was stated as fact only,” Levis wrote. “That was his way or one of his ways. It was all a matter of carving out a style so impermissive of the merely and suspiciously personal, a style so lean and scrupulous and classical, that the poem cast out the poet, and what was said cast out the sayer.”

more from the Philadelphia Inquirer here.

For a good many decades, thick fumes of incense have been wafting from the English literary establishment in the general direction of TS Eliot. The latest offering by the acolytes to the high priest is this study by Craig Raine, which admits that some of Eliot’s drama isn’t up to much but otherwise won’t hear a cross word about the great man. “There is no evidence,” Raine piously remarks, “that Eliot was either a fornicator or a homosexual,” as though being homosexual was a trespass to be vigorously rebutted. Eliot was not, he rashly maintains, a misogynist either, even though the poetry is shot through from end to end with a fear and loathing of women. He even seeks to face down the charge that this ascetic ex-bank clerk was a bit of a dry old stick, although Eliot himself admitted as much.

Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children?

more from Prospect Magazine here.

Madness and Civilization was not just short: it was unhampered by any of the apparatus of modern scholarship. What appeared in 1965 was a truncated text, stripped of several chapters, but also of the thousand and more footnotes that decorated the first French edition. Foucault himself had abbreviated the lengthy volume that constituted his doctoral thesis to produce a small French pocket edition, and it was this version (which contented itself with a small handful of references and a few extra pages from the original text) that appeared in translation. This could be read in a few hours, and if extraordinarily large claims rested on a shaky empirical foundation, this was perhaps not immediately evident. The pleasures of a radical reinterpretation of the place of psychiatry in the modern world (and, by implication, of the whole Enlightenment project to glorify reason) could be absorbed in very little time. Any doubts that might surface about the book’s claims could always be dismissed by gestures towards a French edition far weightier and more solemn – a massive tome that monoglot English readers were highly unlikely, indeed unable, to consult for themselves, even supposing that they could have laid their hands on a copy.

None of this seems to have rendered the book’s claims implausible, at least to a complaisant audience. Here, indeed, is a world turned upside down.

more from the TLS here.

Ingenious, enchanting, and mysterious, and with an underlying note of relentlessness and rigidity, the work of Martìn Ramìrez presents a way of newly seeing a specific physical terrain. In the pictures of this self-taught or “outsider” artist, a Mexican immigrant who spent half his life in American mental institutions, where he made all his art, we are given distillations of a rhythmically rolling, mountainous, and largely sand-colored land. It is crossed with sweeping, serpentine railroad tracks and highways, busy always with the movement of trains, cars, and buses, and it is punctuated here and there with dark entrances to tunnels through the mountains—erotically charged zones, in effect, which swallow up the various vehicles or send them zooming out. We see horsemen brandishing pistols, Madonnas, and the towers of Catholic churches. There are hares, antelopes, and wild dogs as well as glimpses, via images from magazines that Ramìrez collaged onto his drawings, of a more modern western landscape, one marked by the smiling, pert young women in cowgirl gear and the huge new locomotives and automobiles of American advertising of the 1940s and 1950s.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

A BRAZEN shout from long trumpets held high at the angle of a Hitler salute. Cut to medium close-up of young Aryan faces with puffed cheeks. Dolly back as two new biographies of Leni Riefenstahl appear virtually at once. Jürgen Trimborn’s book, well translated from the German by Edna McCown, has the better pictures. Steven Bach’s book, backed up by his deep personal experience as a high-echelon film executive handling dingbat directors, has the better text. Though neither book is precisely adulatory, put them together and they add up to an awful lot of attention. She might be dead, but she won’t lie down.

The same was true for much of the time she was still alive. Born in 1902, she lived for more than a hundred years. In less than half that time, she acquired a brilliant reputation. But she had to spend the rest of her life mounting a posthumous defense of it.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From Seed magazine:

A colossal squid weighing nearly half a tonne (ton) and believed to be the biggest ever caught is being kept on ice as scientists ponder whether to put it into a massive microwave oven.

The squid, caught by New Zealand fishermen in Antarctica last month has been measured at the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington at 495 kilograms (1,090 pounds) and 10 metres (33 feet) in length. Its weight had earlier been estimated at 450 kilograms.

But scientists say the frozen squid is so large, by the time the centre of the aquatic giant is defrosted the outer flesh could have rotted.

So they are considering using a massive one tonne (ton) microwave oven to speed up defrosting, said Steve O’Shea, a squid expert at Auckland University of Technology.

“A microwave of this sort of size does exist,” he told Radio New Zealand on Thursday.

No final decision has been made on how to defrost the colossal squid, which has eyes as big as a dinner plate. If anyone made squid rings from the beast, they would be as big as tractor tires.

But there are no plans to eat the beast, partly because the flesh contains so much ammonia it would taste like floor cleaner.

More here.

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Tylene at Inhabitat:

MICRO WIND TURBINES: Small Size, Big Impact

Conventional wind turbine technology has been a bit out of reach for most residential consumers living in urban areas—until now. Researchers at Hong Kong University and Lucien Gambarota of Motorwave Ltd. have developed Motorwind, a micro-wind turbine technology small enough for private use in both rural and urban environments. Unlike large-scale wind turbines, Motorwave’s micro-wind turbines are light, compact (25 cm rotor diameter), and can generate power with wind speeds as low as 2 meters/second. The gear-like turbines can be linked to fit just about anywhere and a row of eight turbines costs just $150 for now (prices may decrease once the turbines are mass produced). A portion of the revenue raised from the sale of Motorwind turbines (available for purchase here) will be donated to Hong Kong University to continue researching renewable energy technology.

More here.

From Bookforum:

In early April 1968, Ralph Ellison took part in a literary festival hosted by the University of Notre Dame, where he joined the likes of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and William F. Buckley Jr. on the program. When he took the stage on the evening of the sixth to deliver his remarks, the moment could not have been more charged. The nation was in crisis: Two days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated; across the country, cities had exploded in scenes that seemed uncannily to mirror the apocalyptic final sections of Invisible Man, still one of the handful of truly indispensable American novels. But there would be no resounding statement or mournful eulogy; instead, Ellison talked about the function of the novel in American democracy.

It was a signature Ellisonian gesture, perhaps too modest for the hour, but forceful in its way. Fifteen years before, he had put his invisible man down a hole in an attempt, he said in his 1953 National Book Award speech, “to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.” Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, as intellectuals and writers clenched their fists and took to the barricades, Ellison appealed hopefully to America’s literary past as a way to transcend the country’s racial fractures and ferocious contests of identity.

His stubborn faith in that tradition was breathtaking. Some were baffled by what they saw as his scholarly aloofness; others were outraged.

More here.

In The Nation, Richard Wolin reviews some new books on Islam in Europe.

Following the November 2004 murder of filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh–who was fond of referring to Muslims as “goat fuckers”–by a Moroccan Dutchman with Islamist leanings, Dutch patience with multiculturalism, already strained in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, seems to have reached a tipping point. In 1999 immigrants made up 45 percent of Amsterdam’s population. Projections suggest that the percentage will increase to 52 percent by 2015. The authors of When Ways of Life Collide: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands deem the Dutch multicultural experiment to be a grand and unequivocal failure. In their view, multiculturalism and liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible. Their argument is a relatively simple one: By encouraging “difference” among ethnic subgroups, multiculturalism ends up turning these groups into targets of resentment and thereby insuring their rejection by the majority culture. As the authors remark in mock astonishment: “No one anticipated that liberal values would be used to legitimize illiberal practices. But so they have. What other reaction could the majority have but to reject Muslim immigrants? What other conclusion could they draw but to oppose cultural pluralism and to press for assimilation?”

Yet behind such claims lies an additional, unsupported insinuation or suspicion: that Islam and liberal democracy are incompatible. As others have noted, this perspective, rather than encouraging tolerance and openness among citizens, ends up blaming the victims and pandering to majority prejudice. Moreover, it conveniently overlooks the many highly successful instances of European Muslim integration. In France, for example, it has become fashionable to speak of the rise of a successful and prosperous beurgoisie French slang for second- generation North African immigrants.)

Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies has an interesting post on responses to the crisis in Zimbabwe and Mugabe’s descent into greater thuggery.

Amnesty International certainly thinks that Thabo Mbeki and his government could be more unequivocal in condemning the human rights abuses in Zimbabwe; there is a case that could be made for actual economic sanctions of the “individually targeted” kind – cutting Mugabe off from international travel, luxury goods imports and so on. However I do think that people need to remember that however bad things are in Zimbabwe, a civil war will mean that they get much, much worse, and that it is not surprising that the South African government see this possibility a lot more vividly than anyone else does[1], since not only will they be seeing the worst of the refugee problem, they already have strong indications[2] that a Zimbabwean civil war could spill over into their country.

However, whatever South Africa does is only going to have a marginal effect, and it is really unfair to pretend that they have a magic wand that they could wave to get rid of Mugabe painlessly, and they are only failing to wave it out of misplaced loyalty for Mugabe’s support to the ANC back in the apartheid era. This kind of magical thinking is one of the defining characteristics of the Decent Left – from Iraq to Darfur to Afghanistan, their version of “internationalism” is always predicated on a totally unrealistic view of what it is possible to achieve by foreign intervention, diplomatic or otherwise. (Alex de Waal, in a LRB article linked in the AW comments, sets out exactly how complicated, difficult and prone to failure the whole process really is). I’ve argued before that it just isn’t on to demand that “something must be done” without saying specifically what, and I think a lot of people are doing exactly this in the case of Zimbabwe – either that or they’ve forgotten just how horrific an African civil war can be.

The sudden motion sensors on the MacBook Pro are designed to “protect your data if it detects a fall, by parking the hard drive head during fast changes in orientation.” Mac users have adapted that feature it to a much more important and necessary: a cheap Jedi weapon. You can find the program here. Watch a Mac Jedi master in motion.