Radio Program at the BBC, via Clifford at Cosmic Variance:

In 1759 the British mathematician Francis Maseres wrote that negative numbers “darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple”. Because of their dark and mysterious nature, Maseres concluded that negative numbers did not exist, as did his contemporary, William Friend. However, other mathematicians were braver. They took a leap into the unknown and decided that negative numbers could be used during calculations, as long as they had disappeared upon reaching the solution.

The history of negative numbers is one of stops and starts. The trailblazers were the Chinese who by 100 BC were able to solve simultaneous equations involving negative numbers. The Ancient Greeks rejected negative numbers as absurd, by 600 AD, the Indians had written the rules for the multiplication of negative numbers and 400 years later, Arabic mathematicians realised the importance of negative debt. But it wasn’t until the Renaissance that European mathematicians finally began to accept and use these perplexing numbers.

Why were negative numbers considered with such suspicion? Why were they such an abstract concept? And how did they finally get accepted?

More here.

Maggie Wittlin in Seed Magazine:

Darwin’s primary legacy, the theory of evolution, has robustly withstood years of scientific challenges. But now a team of Stanford researchers has published a paper in Science claiming they can top Darwin’s second monster: sexual selection theory.

The Stanford group says sexual selection theory wrongly models interactions between the sexes as competitive. The group has a new theory, social selection, which models mate selection as a cooperative game where parties seek to maximize group welfare.

Darwinian sexual selection is a theory of conflict: It asserts that men and women have different goals in terms of what they look for in a partner. Males want to have sex with several females in order to create as many offspring as possible, while females want to have sex with very few, high-quality males, who will give their eggs the best genes.

More here.

“Though the Norwegian artist is known for a single image, he was one of the most prolific, innovative and influential figures in modern art.”

Arthur Lubow in Smithsonian Magazine:

Edvard Munch, who never married, called his paintings his children and hated to be separated from them. Living alone on his estate outside Oslo for the last 27 years of his life, increasingly revered and increasingly isolated, he surrounded himself with work that dated to the start of his long career. Upon his death in 1944, at the age of 80, the authorities discovered—behind locked doors on the second floor of his house—a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and 15,391 prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks, copperplates and photographs. Yet in a final irony of his difficult life, Munch is famous today as the creator of a single image, which has obscured his overall achievement as a pioneering and influential painter and printmaker.

More here.

A while ago, I posted on Zopa, a British lending system that takes an online Dutch auction model and applies it to credit, sort of an eBay for loans. Now the model has come to the US, with a bit of the microcredit flair.

People who need money request it, and other people bid for the privilege of lending it to them. Prosper makes sure everything is safe, fair and easy…

Responsible people tend to stick together. At Prosper, a group can be official, like a school’s PTA, or informal, like the neighborhood dog-walking club. In either case, one person is the designated group leader who confirms that everyone in the group is real.

When you join a responsible group with a good payment history, you get a good reputation by association, and lenders are more likely to offer good interest rates. But, belonging to a good group puts some pressure on you, too. If you stop making your loan payments, you’ll not only tarnish your own reputation, but the group’s as well.

Quinn Norton in Wired:

Bonabeau, a former researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, calls his innovation “the hunch engine.” Presented to a general audience for the first time at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference here, the engine is a technological implementation of the “obscenity principle” — a user of the hunch engine may not know what they are looking for, but they will “know it when they see it,” the test Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously offered as a metric to define obscenity.

When the user starts the hunch engine he is presented with a seed — a starting point — and a set of mutations. The user selects mutations that look promising in his eyes, and the application uses that selection to generate another set of mutations, continuing in that fashion until the user is satisfied with what he sees.

Call it guided natural selection, where the selector for fitness is what looks good to the human in front of the monitor.

More here.

“The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival starts on Friday, March 24. Previewing events at the festival, Richard Dawkins looks back at the extraordinary 30-year history of his first book, The Selfish Gene.”

From the London Times:

It is sobering to realise that I have lived nearly half my life with The Selfish Gene — for better, for worse. Over the years, as each subsequent book has appeared, publishers have sent me on tour to promote it. Audiences respond to the new book with gratifying enthusiasm, applaud politely and ask intelligent questions. Then they line up to buy, and have me sign . . . The Selfish Gene. That is a bit of an exaggeration. Some do buy the new book and, for the rest, my wife consoles me by arguing that people who newly discover an author will naturally tend to go back to his first book: having read The Selfish Gene, surely they’ll work their way through to the latest and (to its fond parent) favourite baby?

I would mind more if I could claim that The Selfish Gene had become severely outmoded and superseded. Unfortunately (from one point of view) I cannot. Details have changed and factual examples burgeoned mightily. But there is little in it that I would rush to unwrite now, or apologise for. Arthur Cain, late professor of zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the 1960s, described The Selfish Gene in 1976 as a “young man’s book”. He was deliberately quoting a commentator on AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. I was flattered by the comparison, although I knew that Ayer had recanted much of his first book and I could hardly miss Cain’s pointed implication that I should, in the fullness of time, do the same.

More here.

He was born the year British Imperial forces were squaring up to the Zulus and Tennyson’s death was still fourteen years in the offing. He once met someone who had met Napoleon. He held a door for Lenin at the British Museum. He was deemed by Ramsay McDonald to be the natural successor to Robert Bridges, a voice-of-the-voiceless laureate for Britain’s first labour prime minister. He lost his son in WWII. He died the year the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and Norman Mailer was jailed after Vietnam protests in Washington. More than any poet I can think of, his life and work straddle two irreconcilable worlds.

Nowadays it is difficult to credit his fame. The Everlasting Mercy was declared “nine-tenths sheer filth” by that paragon of piety Lord Alfred Douglas. The 1923 edition of Collected Poems sold eighty thousand copies. It is equally difficult to make any serious critical defense. Even Yeats, who was among his closest literary allies, advised him to sing in music halls.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

For miraculous proof of how the old can be new again, art lovers, but especially painters, should make it their business to visit what I think is one of the secret best gallery shows in town by one of the secret best painters of the late-19th/early-20th century: William Nicholson (1872-1949), who is the English Chardin by way of Manet and Whistler. It makes sense that this show, the first of this almost forgotten artist in a New York gallery since 1926, was curated by one of the secret best art critics around, Sanford Schwartz. (Matters are only made more cosmic by gallerist Paul Kasmin being Nicholson’s great-grandson.)

more from Jerry Salz at the Village Voice here.

The exhibition currently at the Palazzo Bricherasio in Turin, Le tre vite del Papiro di Artemidoro: Voci e sguardi dall’Egitto greco-romano, is proving to be a remarkable cultural eye-opener. It centres on a new papyrus from Greco-Roman Egypt. The excitement this time is generated not by some luckily preserved fragment of lost literature (though this papyrus has that too, with a page or two of previously unknown Greek). It comes instead from a startling series of ancient sketches which promises to go some way towards bridging the frustrating gap between the extravagant enthusiasm of Greek and Latin writers for the masterpieces of ancient painting, and the generally unimpressive specimens that we can actually see.

more from the TLS here.

From The New York Times:

Pregnancy can be the most wonderful experience life has to offer. But it can also be dangerous. Around the world, an estimated 529,000 women a year die during pregnancy or childbirth. Ten million suffer injuries, infection or disability. To David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, these grim statistics raise a profound puzzle about pregnancy. “Pregnancy is absolutely central to reproduction, and yet pregnancy doesn’t seem to work very well,” he said. “If you think about the heart or the kidney, they’re wonderful bits of engineering that work day in and day out for years and years. But pregnancy is associated with all sorts of medical problems. What’s the difference?”

The difference is that the heart and the kidney belong to a single individual, while pregnancy is a two-person operation. And this operation does not run in perfect harmony. Instead, Dr. Haig argues, a mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it.

More here.

Natural compounds have proven to be a treasure trove of medicinal properties. For example, the bark of the Pacific yew tree yielded a compound that has helped battle some forms of cancer. Such finds have led to a new industry–bioprospecting–and such prospectors have fanned out across the globe in search of nature’s remedies. Now a compound isolated from coral collected off the coast of Okinawa has shown the ability to slow down and possibly prevent virus replication and it may hold promise as a cancer treatment.

More here.

Yoo Junghyun. Face 11. 2005

Acrylic on canvas.

More on this young Korean artist here.

RB: Let’s talk about Beasts of No Nation. Why did you want to write this book?

UI: I guess it was really wanting to understand what the experiences of being a child soldier—which is an odd thing to say because you can’t really understand it unless you have been one. But wanting to have deeper understanding and not just—you read newspaper articles and you hear things on the news and see pictures and [say], “Oh, wow, that’s sad.” And then you move on, you know? Every so often in your life something happens and you say, “I can’t move on from this. This isn’t something I can just put to the side and say, ‘This is happening to people and I have other things to do in my existence.’” It doesn’t work like that sometimes. Those people who really contribute to society are the ones who do that all the time. They say, “This is a problem and we are not going to brush this problem aside.” So I guess, for me it was just a small step in saying, “OK, I have seen this and I can’t brush this aside. So let me take this small step to learn more and more about it.”

more from The Morning News here.

The day my geisha arrives on my doorstep I feel, in a word, geishariffic! At least twice a day my geisha performs this eloquent, high-risk choreographed dance for me. She jumps around, twirls, and throws herself to the floor in beautiful, exquisite movements. I tell her she can stop when I see her getting a little tired. She knows I will be disappointed if she does stop, though. I want more. She continues dancing for about an hour or so. My geisha loves to unwind from her long, hard day of entertaining me by drawing me a warm, soothing bath, adding salts and mixing in exotic fragrances. She improvises a song about my hairy little potbelly. I’ve always been self-conscious about that feature on my body, but hearing it put into song makes me feel special.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Linta, my sister, sends me this:

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony…

Over the past 5 years, we’ve carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists – ranging from popular to obscure – and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time.

Here’s Pandora’s playlist made off of The Clash’s Magnificent Seven.

The Call Up, The Clash

Children of the Revolution, the Violent Femmes (“because it features electric rock instrumentation, the subtle use of vocal harmony, minor key tonality, electric pianos and prominent percussion.”)

Medicine Man, Barclay James Harvest (“because if features electric rock instrumentation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping, minor key tonality and prominent percussion.”)

Argument, Fugazi

Five to One, The Doors

Tired and Test, Brucce Cockburn

Hell or High Water, Johnny Dowd

Steppenwolf, Hawkwind

Black Dove, Beehive and the Barracudas

The Devil Made Me Do it, Voodoo Glow Skulls

Overpowered by Funk, The Clash

From Science:

Even predators have enemies, and having a set of claws and sharp teeth isn’t a guarantee against attack. But just which killers do predators have to watch out for? A rare look into carnivore-on-carnivore violence indicates that size matters: Predators tend to strike only those species somewhat smaller than themselves, while avoiding true pipsqueaks and similarly sized or bigger animals.

The survey of 59 different predatory mammal species–including tigers, leopards, foxes, and wolves–revealed thousands of instances of one species slaughtering another. The researchers then combined these data with several biological factors for each species, including body mass, diet, and geographic range.

Not surprisingly, the team found that if one predator was bigger than the other, the fight was on.

More here.

“Most discussions of U.S. policy in Iraq assume that it should be informed by the lessons of Vietnam. But the conflict in Iraq today is a communal civil war, not a Maoist “people’s war,” and so those lessons are not valid. “Iraqization,” in particular, is likely to make matters worse, not better.”

Stephen Biddle in Foreign Affairs:

Contentious as the current debate over Iraq is, all sides seem to make the crucial assumption that to succeed there the United States must fight the Vietnam War again — but this time the right way. The Bush administration is relying on an updated playbook from the Nixon administration. Pro-war commentators argue that Washington should switch to a defensive approach to counterinsurgency, which they feel might have worked wonders a generation ago. According to the antiwar movement, the struggle is already over, because, as it did in Vietnam, Washington has lost hearts and minds in Iraq, and so the United States should withdraw.

But if the debate in Washington is Vietnam redux, the war in Iraq is not. The current struggle is not a Maoist “people’s war” of national liberation; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics. Although it is being fought at low intensity for now, it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices.

More here.

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.