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.

David Smith’s preoccupations with human and animal form had less to do with a romanticized yearning for a pre-industrial past or, as some critics have suggested, opportunistic cultural grave robbing, than they had to do with an abiding interest in the transformative aspects of technology. In Gary K. Wolfe’s book, “The Known and the Unknown, The Iconography of Science Fiction,” an analytical and theoretical study of the recurring icons that appear throughout the science fiction genre, he states that “Technology not only creates new environments for humanity, it also creates new images of humanity itself, which tend to mediate between the natural environment of mankind and the artificial ones it has created, between the past and the future, and between the known and the unknown.” Smith was interested in the ambiguity of form and the ambiguity inherent in the materials he used. He dwelt upon the fact that steel could be used to make agrarian tools and destructive weapons; it had the potential to manifest a wide spectrum of psychological impulses.

more from Artcritical here.

The English and the French have enjoyed a love-hate relationship for centuries. I say ‘the English’ because the Scots stand rather apart, or betwixt and between. Individual Scots – notably, as Robert and Isabelle Tombs remark, Adam Smith – have helped form a British mindset which the French find repugnant; yet Scots retain fond memories of the Auld Alliance and still speak of England as ‘the auld enemy’ – no sweetness there. Moreover, by a decree of Louis XII, never rescinded, Scots resident in France were to be regarded as French nationals. In August 1944 Colette, most French of all French writers, told her husband she would not believe in the liberation of Paris till he brought her a Scottish officer. ‘In a kilt?’ ‘Certainly in a kilt.’ He produced a major from a Highland regiment, who stayed to lunch. ‘My wife reads a lot,’ he said, ‘I expect she’ll have heard of you.’ This is by the by. It must be admitted, however, that the French usually speak of ‘Angleterre’ and ‘les Anglais’, rather than of Britain and the British.

more from the Literary Review here.

From EGO:

Remember when only one woman could flash that tricky one-two punch of cutting-edge dance-pop and mesmerizing, scandal-drenched visuals? To say that Madonna was an innovator is putting it mildly. To say that she was an instigator is stating the obvious. But to submit that she was the last female pop-culture revolutionary of the 20th century, well…now you’re getting somewhere.

Madonna is an artist for whom fame has reached such unscalable heights, and whose persona has become so infused in the limelight, that one often wonders what it is she became famous for in the first place. One often forgets that Madonna was the first female pop-star who truly owned and controlled her music, image, and career. And in the process she completely manipulated her audience and the media with her songwriting, her videos, and most importantly – her sexuality.

More here.