Two young black dancers, brightly dressed and outrageously queer, sashay down a dull London street. All tight crotch and flamboyant gesture, they are peacocks in a warren of plucked pigeons. For sheer perverse effect on the desexed locals, one dancer halts the sidewalk flow to bend and inspect his shoe—“so that the recalcitrant bowler-hatted or tweed-skirted natives found themselves curiously obstructed by an exotic, questioning behind.”

A boy and girl reunite in a London dance club. They are young and in love; misery and violence are elsewhere. The music plays just for them. And then: “The side window crashed, and a petrol bomb came in and rolled among the dancers and exploded, and the electrics all cut out, and there were shouts and screaming.”

Thus, a worldview: irrestistible arses, and bombs on the dance floor.

Colin MacInnes, the novelist, essayist, critic, experimentalist, and inveterate fringe-dweller whose three essential works—City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), and Mr Love and Justice (1960)—form “the London trilogy,” is not exactly unknown, but neither is he quite known.

more from The Believer here.

From Scientific American:

The Dutch have a long history with chocolate. Although native Mexicans and their Spanish conquerors first used the bitter bean–and reported on its tonic powers–a Dutchman was the first to extract modern cocoa and neutralize its bitterness with alkali. The modern chocolate bar was born. Now, results from a study of aging Dutch men have shown that cocoa consumers were half as likely to die from disease than those who did not eat the sweet treat.

Brian Bujisse of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven and his colleagues measured the cocoa intake of 470 men between 1985 and 2000 as part of the Zutphen Elderly Study, a longitudinal look at nearly 1,000 Dutch men between 65 and 84 years of age. Among those who ate the most chocolate–averaging more than four grams a day–average systolic and diastolic blood pressure was 3.7 and 2.1 millimeters of mercury lower than their chocolate-spurning peers. This result did not hold true for other sweet foods nor did it vary among men who also smoked, were inactive or consumed a lot of alcohol. And, despite being strongly associated with greater intake of calories, chocolate lowered the overall risk of cardiovascular or any other disease by as much as 50 percent.

More here.

From Nature:

Ever struggled to recall something you knew you ought to remember? Part of the problem might be that your brain just wasn’t ready to store the memory in the first place. Neuroscientists have discovered that how successfully you form memories depends on your frame of mind not just during and after the event in question, but also before it. “People didn’t realize that what the brain does before something happens influences the memory of that event,” says Leun Otten of University College London, UK, who led the research. “They looked just at the response.”

But it turns out that if your brain is ‘primed’ to receive information, you will have less trouble recalling it later. Memory is aided by meaning.

More here.

Peter Galbraith in the New York Review of Books:

Two books, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate and L. Paul Bremer’s My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, written with Malcolm McConnell, are essential for those who want to understand what went wrong. Packer’s book is written with great clarity and draws on his experience as one of The New Yorker‘s more perceptive reporters. He is clearly a thorough and careful notetaker. As a result, the people he writes about—Washington neoconservatives, CPA bureaucrats, and ordinary Iraqis whose lives were turned upside down by decisions made elsewhere—speak to the reader in their own voices. In analyzing the war, Packer begins with the ideologies that shaped its architects’ thinking and then brilliantly describes the unrealistic assumptions and bureaucratic maneuvering that resulted in the US taking over Iraq with no plan for its postwar administration. Bremer, as his title suggests, does not believe that the occupation was a complete disaster. He provides a briskly written account of an eventful year, assigning most of the blame to others, notably Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, and the members of the Iraqi Governing Council whom he appointed. The value of his book lies in his often inadvertent revelations of failure.

More here.

Keith Gessen in The New Yorker:

A new book of Grossman’s war writings—a collection taken from his notebooks and his published pieces—has just appeared in English as “A Writer at War” (Pantheon; $27.50), translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. Beevor, whose book “Stalingrad” is the definitive account of the fighting in that city and relies heavily for color on Grossman’s reportage, is very fond of Grossman, and this collection weaves together his texts alongside lucid historical commentary to tell the story of the war through Grossman’s eyes. But what about Grossman himself? One wants to read the notebooks as a novel of education, recording a growing consciousness of the brutality and the corruption of the Soviet regime. In fact, a bit disappointingly, the Grossman we meet at the beginning of the book is already skeptical and wary of the regime. He notes the propaganda in the papers. “The bedraggled enemy continues his cowardly advance,” goes the headline, as the Germans take town after town. Interrogations of occasional German prisoners (at this point it was mostly Red Army soldiers who were being taken prisoner, in the hundreds of thousands) are absurd and demoralizing, a pathetic kind of Soviet tourism.

More here.

Bryant Varney of Northern Michigan University constructs replicas of buildings using  wooden Jenga blocks. Here’s the Sears Tower:

More crazy Jenga buildings here.

Jeff Barnosky in the Morning News (via Phronesisaical):

The other one, the one called Jeff Barnosky, is the one who buys things. Expensive things and confusing things. Seven bottles of Vaseline. A salt shaker. A Ford Escape. I walk through the streets of Dallas—even though I’ve never been there—and shop at every store. Last Tuesday, I apparently put a down payment on a condo in Orlando. I know of Jeff Barnosky through his charges. He likes waffles, strip clubs, and miniature golf. The other Barnosky rides the highways of America, filling up his 30 gallons with the good stuff, making sure that his engine hums as he takes in the heart of America, staying at the best hotels, ordering room service (more waffles!), and stopping at retail outlets to buy thousands of dollars in leotards.

I applaud the other Barnosky for pursuing his advanced degrees; at least I assume that’s what he’s doing with $40,000 in private student loans. At night, I try to watch television as the phone rings, asking me to pay my outstanding bills. I simply tell them that they must call the other Jeff Barnosky, the one who has digital cable at his winter house in Aspen and broadband at the place he summers in Montauk.

One night, after hearing my name praised on the local public radio station for taking care of their pledge drive in a single phone call (and breaking their heart in a follow-up call), I come home to find my girlfriend packing her bags. She looks up at me, on the verge of tears…

More here.  [Here’s the Borges version, in case you want to remind yourself of it.]

From The National Geographic:

For ten years a facial cancer has threatened to wipe out Australia’s Tasmanian devils. The cancer is spreading fast, and scientists now say the disease transferred in tooth-baring combat. Now dubbed devil facial-tumor disease, the ailment produces enormous growths that push the animals’ teeth out of line and make it difficult for them to eat. Afflicted animals generally die of starvation within six months. The disease has spread rapidly. Today biologists report that few animals evade it long enough to live into old age, which for a Tasmanian devil means about five years.

Scientists have long known the disease is infectious, but nobody understood what caused it. Now  they’ve found the answer: The animals inject cancer cells into each other when they engage in mating battles.

More here.

From Science:

The wrath of god is the traditional explanation for plagues of marauding insects that devour everything in their path. What really drives the swarm, according to a new study of crickets, is a hankering for protein and salt, along with the fear of getting cannibalized. Every few years, Mormon crickets march across the western United States by the millions. Last spring, a team led by Stephen Simpson, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, found some clues to their motivations in the trail blazed by a 1-kilometer long Mormon cricket marching band. For one thing, the crickets were not starving because they left most edible plants untouched. But they gobbled anything high in protein, such as seed pods, flowers, and even mammal feces. Salt also seemed to be on the menu; the crickets swallowed soil if it was soaked with urine. And a strange clue was the discovery that many crickets were eating each other.

More here.

Roger Dobson and Abul Taher in the London Times:

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.

More here.

“They have 32,000 major parts, 750,000 rivets, 23 miles of wiring and, when assembled, a pair will have a span wider than a football pitch. But if the wings of the Airbus A380, the biggest passenger plane ever built, are unprecedented in scale, it is the journey they take from north Wales to the company’s HQ in southern France that is truly astonishing. Aida Edemariam follows one wing on its epic voyage, and traces an extraordinary tale of engineering.”

From The Guardian:

When the A380 finally goes into service at the end of this year, it will carry about 550 people, making it the largest passenger aircraft ever to take to the skies. It is not the largest aircraft ever built (the Russian Antonov, a freighter, holds that honour), but at up to 35% greater capacity, it can claim to represent as titanic a revolution in commercial flying as Boeing’s jumbo – the 747-400 – was 36 years ago. Partly because of the unique challenges of its size (73m in length, the equivalent of seven London Routemasters queued nose to tail, and with a wingspan of 79.8m) and partly because of demands from airlines that planes should be quieter, less polluting and above all cheaper to fly per passenger, it has not been enough simply to tinker with designs for previous aircraft. Airbus went back to the drawing board and designed the A380 from scratch, which means it is also as major a technological achievement as Concorde. Being manufactured at 16 different European sites, however, using the skills of 1,500 suppliers in 30 countries, this singular aeroplane demands a level of international cooperation that the Concorde project did not even hint at.

More here.

Our friend, Lindsay Beyerstein, of Majikthise, relates endearing details of her childhood while explaining that it is possible to be the child of academics and still be a decent person (unlike, say, Alex Rawls–yes, son of the John Rawls):

My parents met in Berkeley in the 1960s while my dad was doing his PhD. Being raised by academic hippies is like being raised by wolves–you can rejoin human society, but you can never integrate seamlessly.

In my family, even pets and infants are addressed in complete sentences. There are no taboo subjects, except when the conservative relatives visit from the interior. Then we can’t talk about religion.

I remember the day in kindergarden when one little boy announced that he had a baby brother. How did that happen, someone asked. The kid said something about God. Other kids were floating theories about angel-storks. I felt I had to set the record straight. Many children cried. My mom was called in for a parent-teacher conference. The teacher was very upset.

“Did she tell the truth?” Mom asked.
“Oh, yes,” the teacher said, “In great detail.”
“I don’t think we have a problem, then,” Mom said.

My uncle, the philosopher, used to be a heavy smoker. One day when I was about six, I said, no doubt irritatingly,

“If I were you, I wouldn’t smoke.”

He answered, “If you were me, you’d smoke. I smoke.” I thought about that for a long time.

Another early philosophical memory is from a long car trip. My mom sent my dad to the library to get some books on tape to amuse me 10, and my brother 6. He came back with “The Death of Socrates” and “On The Road.” By the time we reached southern Washington my brother and I were sobbing inconsolably and mom looked about ready to kill dad. The mood brightened after we popped in “On the Road” and mocked the dated sex scenes as a family.

More here.  [Lindsay needs money for a new computer. Help her!]

Robin posted this and then this a couple of days ago about a puzzling advance in quantum computing. Both posts confused most people who read them (even the writers at Nature seemed quite unsure of what exactly they were reporting, taking refuge in vague but dramatic language), so I turned to the smartest physicist I happen to be friends with, Sean Carrol, of Cosmic Variance for clarification. He has obliged (thanks Sean!) with a tour de force of scientific exposition. It is still not trivial (please, we are talking advanced quantum theory here!) to understand, but if you pay careful attention, you should get the basic idea. This is how he explains it:

Quantum mechanics, as we all know, is weird. It’s weird enough in its own right, but when some determined experimenters do tricks that really bring out the weirdness in all its glory, and the results are conveyed to us by well-intentioned but occasionally murky vulgarizations in the popular press, it can seem even weirder than usual.

Last week was a classic example: the computer that could figure out the answer without actually doing a calculation! (See Uncertain Principles, Crooked Timber, 3 Quarks Daily.) The articles refer to an experiment performed by Onur Hosten and collaborators in Paul Kwiat’s group at Urbana-Champaign, involving an ingenious series of quantum-mechanical miracles. On the surface, these results seem nearly impossible to make sense of. (Indeed, Brad DeLong has nearly given up hope.) How can you get an answer without doing a calculation? Half of the problem is that imprecise language makes the experiment seem even more fantastical than it really is — the other half is that it really is quite astonishing.

Let me make a stab at explaining, perhaps not the entire exercise in quantum computation, but at least the most surprising part of the whole story — how you can detect something without actually looking at it. The substance of everything that I will say is simply a translation of the nice explanation of quantum interrogation at Kwiat’s page, with the exception that I will forgo the typically violent metaphors of blowing up bombs and killing cats in favor of a discussion of cute little puppies.

So here is our problem: a large box lies before us, and we would like to know whether there is a sleeping puppy inside. Except that, sensitive souls that we are, it’s really important that we don’t wake up the puppy. Furthermore, due to circumstances too complicated to get into right now, we only have one technique at our disposal: the ability to pass an item of food into a small flap in the box. If the food is something uninteresting to puppies, like a salad, we will get no reaction — the puppy will just keep slumbering peacefully, oblivious to the food. But if the food is something delicious (from the canine point of view), like a nice juicy steak, the aromas will awaken the puppy, which will begin to bark like mad.

It would seem that we are stuck. If we stick a salad into the box, we don’t learn anything, as from the outside we can’t tell the difference between a sleeping puppy and no puppy at all. If we stick a steak into the box, we will definitely learn whether there is a puppy in there, but only because it will wake up and start barking if it’s there, and that would break our over-sensitive hearts. Puppies need their sleep, after all.

Fortunately, we are not only very considerate, we are also excellent experimental physicists with a keen grasp of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, according to the conventional interpretations that are good enough for our purposes here, says three crucial and amazing things…

More here.  [Photo shows Sean Carroll.]

Peter D. Haines. Migration. 2001.

300 elements in bronze. Longest 14″.

More on the artist here, here, and here.

“China’s economic boom has dazzled investors and captivated the world. But beyond the new high-rises and churning factories lie rampant corruption, vast waste, and an elite with little interest in making things better. Forget political reform. China’s future will be decay, not democracy.”

Minxin Pei in Foreign Policy:

Upon close examination, China’s record loses some of its luster. China’s economic performance since 1979, for example, is actually less impressive than that of its East Asian neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, during comparable periods of growth. Its banking system, which costs Beijing about 30 percent of annual GDP in bailouts, is saddled with nonperforming loans and is probably the most fragile in Asia. The comparison with India is especially striking. In six major industrial sectors (ranging from autos to telecom), from 1999 to 2003, Indian companies delivered rates of return on investment that were 80 to 200 percent higher than their Chinese counterparts. The often breathless conventional wisdom on China’s economic reform overlooks major flaws that render many predictions about China’s trajectory misleading, if not downright hazardous.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein was on the John Gibson Show this past Friday. Every week on “Blue Blogapalooza”, Gibson interviews a liberal blogger. Most of you know that we are huge fans of Lindsay’s and that she always make us think in new and more insightful ways. You can hear the interview here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Jyllands-Posten is Denmark’s largest paper, with a circulation of about 150,000. It is a provincial paper, aligned with the party of prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The paper’s main offices are in Aarhus, the country’s second largest city. It is where I grew up, and the paper still sits on the coffee tables in my family circles. This is a conservative paper and it has always minded the religious and political sensitivities of its core readership: Lutheran farmers and the provincial middle class. It still does. A few years ago the paper rejected a cartoon portraying Jesus Christ because, it thought, publication would offend the readers. The illustrator of the Jesus cartoon gave his Jyllands-Posten rejection letter, which he had kept, to the Guardian. Jens Kaiser, the editor of Jyllands-Posten’s Sunday edition, had written, “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore I will not use them.” When confronted with the old rejection letter, he said, “It is ridiculous to bring this forward now. It has nothing to do with the Muhammad cartoons.” Some saw double standards at play.

The Muhammad cartoons started out as a political gag. Flemming Rose, the paper’s culture editor, decided last summer that he was fed up with what he described as the spreading of “self-censorship” on matters related to Islam and solicited cartoonists for drawings of “how they saw the Prophet.” Cartoons are an important anti-totalitarian expression, Rose wrote, and therefore the paper had asked 40 Danish cartoonists to draw their image of Muhammad. Only 12 responded. The 12 cartoons were published last September, under the headline “Muhammad’s Face.” As examples of the epidemic of self-censorship, Rose cited a stand-up comedian who had complained that he was afraid to make fun of Muhammad on television, and a children’s book author who complained that he could not get anyone to illustrate his book about Muhammad. Rose also claimed that three theatres had put on shows deriding George W Bush but none Osama Bin Laden. (Considering that a member of parliament from the Danish People’s party has called Muslims “a cancer on Danish society,” some people—including the former foreign minister and EU commissioner, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen—say the problem is that there is too little self-censorship in Denmark.)

It is said that humour does not travel well, but these cartoons really were not very funny.

In 1851, Thomas Carlyle wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson recommending William Bartram’s Travels, noting that the book “has a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has also grown immeasurably old.” In 1789, just two years prior to the publication of Bartram’s travelogue, an English curate, amateur naturalist, and less far-flung traveler named Gilbert White issued his equally floundering and eloquent book The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Whereas Bartram explored the then-wilderness of the American South (in addition to the nobly savage customs of the Seminoles, Cherokees, and Choctaws), presenting the marvels of people and place as having no limit or boundary, White confined himself to human and natural decorum and a world filled with all manner of borders and bounds, from the glebe-close to the ewell and the ha-ha, the garden wall to the turnip patch. Whereas Bartram concerned himself with the exotic practices of the Indians and fought with alligators, White contented himself with his local, familiar surroundings and, among other critters, with an imported tortoise named Timothy. Both men, however, reached similar conclusions concerning creatures who belong more comfortably to Nature than does civilized man. On a friendly encounter with a fierce-looking Seminole, Bartram remarked, “Can it be denied, but that the moral principle, which directs the savages to virtuous and praiseworthy actions, is natural or innate?” And White recorded this note when observing Timothy’s eager warmth for the woman who fed him: “Thus not only ‘the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib,’ but the most abject reptile and torpid of beings distinguishes the hand that feeds it, and is touched with the feelings of gratitude!”

Now comes Verlyn Klinkenborg to give both voice and charm to White’s humble and aged Timothy. His splendid novel, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, is also eloquent in its floundering, if we regard it as perfectly natural for a tortoise, out of its native element, to have somewhat halting prose.

more from Bookforum here.