George Packer in The New Yorker:

There was a moment, in April of 1937, when the Lost Generation of nineteen-twenties Paris reunited in Madrid. The occasion was the Spanish Civil War, already in its ninth month, but the regular shelling of the Hotel Florida and other privations of the Fascist siege didn’t prevent Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, and Hemingway’s latest distraction from the thought of suicide, Martha Gellhorn, from living well. Though the Hotel Florida wasn’t the Café des Amateurs, Hemingway managed to procure, thanks in part to impeccable connections with the Spanish government and the Russian general staff, the best food and brandy in the city. Every morning, the other guests woke up to the smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee being prepared by a Hemingway flunky in Room 108, courtesy of the Communist International. The moveable feast had crashed the Red decade.

More here.

From Spacedaily.com:

Working with a material 10 times lighter than steel – but 250 times stronger – would be a dream come true for any engineer. If this material also had amazing properties that made it highly conductive of heat and electricity, it would start to sound like something out of a science fiction novel.

Yet one Florida State University research group, the Florida Advanced Center for Composite Technologies (FAC2T), is working to develop real-world applications for just such a material…

Buckypaper is made from carbon nanotubes — amazingly strong fibers about 1/50,000th the diameter of a human hair that were first developed in the early 1990s. Buckypaper owes its name to Buckminsterfullerene, or Carbon 60 — a type of carbon molecule whose powerful atomic bonds make it twice as hard as a diamond.

More here.

“Intellectual-property protection can be good for the technology industry as well as for its customers, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here). But it requires careful handling.”

From The Economist:

In information technology and telecoms in particular, the role of intellectual property has changed radically. What used to be the preserve of corporate lawyers and engineers in R&D labs has been speedily embraced by the boardroom. “Intellectual-asset management” now figures as a strategic business issue. In America alone, technology licensing revenue accounts for an estimated $45 billion annually; worldwide, the figure is around $100 billion and growing fast.

Technology firms are seeking more patents, expanding their scope, licensing more, litigating more and overhauling their business models around intellectual property. Yet paradoxically, as some companies batten down the hatches, other firms have found ways of making money by opening up their treasure-chest of innovation and sharing it with others. The rise of open-source software is just one example. And a new breed of companies has appeared on the periphery of today’s tech firms, acting as intellectual-property intermediaries and creating a market for ideas.

More here.

From the London Times:

The tradition of bestselling love guides goes back to the Ancient Chinese. Our earliest known manuals were first written in 300BC and buried in a family tomb at Mawangdui, in Hunan province. Recent translation reveals the timeless nature of the subjects they tackled.

Written as Cosmo coverlines, they would look like this: Four Seasons of Sex — and Why Autumn is Hot, Hot, Hot; Wild New Positions; Tiger Roving, Gibbon Grabbing and Fish Gobbling; Aphrodisiacs to Keep You Up All Night!Plus Exclusive! Your Love Route to Immortality.

As ever, it was all nonsense: home-made Viagra recipes involved ingredients such as beetle larvae, wasps and dried snails. The books also promised that any man who had sex with a different virgin every night for 100 nights without ejaculating would live for ever (albeit rather uncomfortably).

More here.

The other day I came across an article in a new journal, In Character, which has issues titled “Thrift”, “Purpose”, “Creativity”. The latest issue is entitled “Loyalty”. In it, I found a article by Bret Stephens on “Keeping Faith with the Jews, Keeping Faith with Israel”. The article was a rejoinder to Tony Judt’s 2003 piece in The New York Review of Books. Judt had written an article which endorsed a binational state as a solution the decades old conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish state.

The idea of a binational state is a old one, but initially it came from the Zionist movement’s left wing—Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt at the moment of Israel’s birth. In more recent times, it was taken up by Palestinian secular nationalists and some in the Left wing, Palestinian and non-Palestinian.

The essay itself was odd. Its opening lines: “This is an essay about loyalty—the loyalty that Jews owe the State of Israel. To understand what such loyalty entails, let me begin by describing an act of betrayal.”

(The article itself was relatively uninteresting, for me at least, if only because Stephens kept suggesting that a Jew may not identify with Jewish religion, history and culture, but to be part of the Jewish community still he or she must minimally identify with what is “filial[ly] and political[ly]” Jewish, by which Stephens implicitly meant loyalty to the Israeli polity. The Satmar came to mind.)

But that wasn’t what caught my eye. Stephens mentioned a web site called “Palestine: Information with a Provenance”. The website catalogs information about people who write and speak on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its categorizations are, well, to say the least interesting. The site’s categories include “Hardline Zionist American Jew” and “anti-Zionist Mizrahi American”.

Stephens reaction was the following.

[T]he radically pro-Palestinian politics of the site were nowhere near as disturbing as the uses to which they had put their views. Among its other features, it places individuals in “author categories”: Jewish, Zionist, Israeli, American, Palestinian, Arab. I “found myself,” so to speak, as “Bret Stephens: Zionist American Israeli Jew.” With a meticulousness that would have delighted Adolf Eichmann, they had made lists, and I was on four of them, the very four they held in greatest contempt.

It struck me, to some extent, as a reverse Campus Watch. And therein was the odd, disturbing bit—which in all honesty I don’t quite know what to make of.

Campus Watch’s response to charge of McCarthyism was and has always been simple.

• Campus Watch is not a government activity or associated with any government organization.

• Campus Watch has no legislative or judiciary authority. It cannot dictate to any educational institution hiring or firing decisions.

•Campus Watch lacks any coercive powers.

And “Palestine: Information with a Provenance”:

A great many untruths and half-truths have been written on the conflict over Palestine. Therefore, it is important to understand the provenance of all material about the situation. For each article, map or book: who produced it? what agenda do the author(s) have? where was it published? what agenda does the journal have? Similarly, it is important to understand the provenance of each film or audio/video clip: who is speaking in it? what agenda do the speakers(s) have? where was the film or clip produced or broadcast? what agenda does the producer/broadcaster have? An attempt is made here to provide this information.

Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault’s case study of modern prisons, or properly, his extension of his sociological claim that one of the hallmarks of the modern era is surveillance, laid out an image of world in which people, cognizant of constantly being watched, alter their behavior and thereby alter themselves. Anthony Giddens and Timur Kuran have made similar claims, though Kuran does not associate it with modernity per se.

The monitoring is not necessarily done by states or other organized forms such as hospitals, asylums, factories and prisons, though states and other formal organizations are in a better position to do it. Or at least were. With the advent of the net, we can all be implicated in this mutual monitoring.

Daniel Pipes and Campus Watch are of course right in that, unlike McCarthy, they are not associated with any government organization, have no legislative authority, and cannot dictate hiring or firing in educational institutions. They are wrong in that they do have a coercive power. The power they have is the specter and, perhaps, reality of the lynch mob. It is certainly the fear that many on Campus Watch’s list feel, and what Bret Stephens felt. If “Palestine: Information with a Provenance” had the same scope and prominence, others on the “blacker” of its list may feel the same.

And it is this in the net and the blogosphere that generates this patrician worry of mine.

Ernesto Caivano: Philapores Navigate the Log and Code, 2003

More on Caivano here and here.

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John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

What’s important is the “utility” to you of the dollars you receive, and their utility drops off, often logarithmically, as you receive more of them. Gaining or losing $1 million means much more to most people than it does to Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. People consider not the dollar amount at stake in any investment or game, but the utility of the dollar amount for them.

Note that the declining average utility of money provides part of the rationale for progressive taxation and higher tax rates on greater wealth.

A less weighty illustration than progressive taxation is provided by a recent British study of the show “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.” It confirms that contestants behave as considerations of utility would suggest. Once they’ve reached a high rung on the winnings ladder, they more often quit while ahead rather than risk falling to a much lower level.

More here.

THE adage “what you see is what you get” could be thought to ring true for a group of people who dedicate their lives to collecting tiny flickers of light from very distant objects. But astronomers and cosmologists, who do exactly that, have long held that the universe is pervaded by far more than that which can be seen. Since the 1930s, they have postulated the existence of “dark matter”, an ethereal and, as yet, undetected form of matter.

Physicists claim to need dark matter to explain why the stars in the outermost reaches of rotating galaxies are moving at such great speeds. If these galaxies consisted only of the stars that can been seen, their gravity would be insufficient to hold on to the outermost stars. The individual stars would simply fly out of the galaxy, like a doll thrown from a rapidly spinning merry-go-round. Thus, the galaxy must contain some mysterious matter that makes it massive enough to keep hold of these stars. . .

Now, in a controversial paper that has recently appeared on arXiv, an online collection of physics papers, Fred Cooperstock and Steven Tieu of the University of Victoria in Canada claim that one of the key pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter is not really there.

more from The Economist here.

“I love George Bush,” said one thoughtful and well-educated young woman, as we sat in the Tehran Kentucky Chicken restaurant, “but I would hate him if he bombed my country.” She would oppose even a significant tightening of economic sanctions on those grounds. A perceptive local analyst reinforced the point. Who or what, he asked, could give this regime renewed popular support, especially among the young? “Only the United States!”

If, however, Europe and the United States can avoid that trap; if whatever we do to slow down the nucleariza-tion of Iran does not end up merely slowing down the democratization of Iran; and if, at the same time, we can find policies that help the gradual social emancipation and eventual self-liberation of Young Persia, then the long-term prospects are good. The Islamic revolution, like the French and Russian revolutions before it, has been busy devouring its own children. One day, its grandchildren will devour the revolution.

more in the New York Review of Books here.

Fame hasn’t always been kind to the reputation of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), whose drawings are now featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s owing to his fame, after all, that van Gogh is still so often described as a deranged genius—the man who cut off his ear in a fit of paranoid rage. Yet the artist’s drawings often tell a different story. For while it’s true that in these drawings every dot, squiggle and stroke of van Gogh’s emphatic pen is charged with an uncommon emotional weight, it’s also true that his draftsmanship is just as often governed by a sustained feat of pictorial precision and control. Complex spatial perspectives are strictly observed even in drawings that are overcrowded with visual detail, and every image—including the artist’s self-portraits—is rendered with a faithful depiction of its observed subject.

more from Hilton Kramer at The New York Observer here.

From Despardes.com:

Is he dead or alive? Now newspaper Ausaf published from Multan has reported that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden died four months ago in a village near Kandahar of severe illness. He was campaigning at Bamiyan, fell very ill, returned to Kandahar where he died and was buried in the “Shada graveyard in the shadow of a mountain.” Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was not far from the truth when he told reporters from CBS News last month, “he has become a cult, I think.”

More here.

Tariq Ali on “No God But God” in the Guardian:

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American writer, a Shia by persuasion, and informs us in the prologue to his book that he will be denounced as an apostate by some and an apologist by others, but that the latter does not bother him since “there is no higher calling than to defend one’s faith”, especially in times of ignorance and hate.

The Shia sects and some of their more esoteric beliefs have little to do with Islamic theology. An Iranian equivalent of Monty Python’s Life of Brian will deconstruct all this one day. Shia mythology (some of it uncritically recycled here) transformed a crude bid for power by Ali’s son, Hussain, and his defeat and death at the hands of the Caliph Yazid, into a sacred martyrdom commemorated to this day with an annual display of self-flagellation and blood-spilling. The reform solution is to ban the self-flagellation and instead encourage participants to donate their blood to hospitals. It’s an amusing idea that misses the whole point about the processions, designed by the Shia clergy to encourage obedience, inculcate the idea of an eternal martyrdom and maintain their grip.

More here.

Cosma Shalizi, indubitably one of the smartest persons in the blogoshere, has posted a brilliant and very substantive review (in other words, he has said in an erudite manner what I thought but couldn’t express anywhere nearly as well when I read the book) that he wrote of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, when it had come out a couple of years ago:

Normally, scientific work is full of references to previous works, if only to say things like “the outmoded theory of Jones [1], unable to accommodate stubborn experimental facts [2–25], has generally fallen out of favor”. This is how you indicate what’s new, what you’re relying on, how you let readers immerse themselves in the web of ideas that is an particular field of research. Wolfram has deliberately omitted references. Now, this is sometimes done: Darwin did it in The Origin of Species, for instance, to try to get it to press quickly. But Wolfram has written 1100 pages over about a decade; what would it have hurt to have included citations? In his end-notes, where he purports to talk about what people have done, he is misleading, or wrong, or both. (An indefinite number of examples can be provided upon request.) To acknowledge that he had predecessors who were not universally blinkered fools would, however, conflict with the persona he is try to project to others, and perhaps to himself.

Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other hand, we have a large mass of dubious speculations (many of them also unoriginal). We have, finally, a single new result of mathematical importance, which is not actually the author’s. Everything is presented as the inspired fruit of a lonely genius, delivering startling insights in isolation from a blinkered and philistine scientific community. We have been this way before.

More here.

From BBC News:

Taiwan has responded to bird flu fears by starting work on its own version of the anti-viral drug, Tamiflu, without waiting for the manufacturer’s consent.

Taiwan officials said they had applied for the right to copy the drug – but the priority was to protect the public.

Tamiflu, made by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche, cannot cure bird-flu but is widely seen as the best anti-viral drug to fight it, correspondents say.

More here.

Dexter Filkins in the New York Times Magazine:

Even in an Army in which ferocious competition produced nearly perfect specimens of brains and lethality, Sassaman stood apart. Commanding some 800 soldiers in the heart of the insurgency-ravaged Sunni Triangle, Sassaman, then 40, had distinguished himself as one of the nimblest, most aggressive officers in Iraq. From his base in Balad, a largely Shiite city in a sea of Sunni villages, Sassaman bucked the civilian authorities and held local elections months earlier than in most of the country’s other towns and cities. His relations with the locals in Balad were so warm that on each Friday afternoon, inside a circle of tanks on an empty field, his men would face off against the Iraqis for a game of soccer. He was a West Point grad and the son of a Methodist minister. As quarterback for Army’s football team in the 1980’s, he ran for 1,002 yards in a single season and carried West Point’s team to its first bowl victory. Everyone in the Army knew of Nate Sassaman.

Yet as his junior officers briefed him in January about what had happened to two Iraqis his men detained that night by the Tigris, the straight lines and rigid hierarchy of the Army that had created him seemed, like so many other American ideas brought to this murky land, no longer particularly relevant…

The events that would end the career of one of the Army’s most celebrated midlevel officers sent a shock through the American force in Iraq. It is only now, with the Army’s investigation complete and Sassaman’s career over, that the story can be pieced together from interviews with him, his comrades and the Iraqis. Twenty-two months after that night on the Tigris, it is a tale that seems like a parable of the dark passage that lay ahead for the Americans in Iraq.

More here.

From Now or Never:

The other day one of my students asked me what I thought about our spending billions to explore space when we have so many problems here on earth that need our attention.  It’s a good question. The USA’s scoping out another moon shot as we speak. China’s orbiting the globe now and should soon be as dizzy as other super-duper powers. Mars is on the horizon. Before you know it there’ll be MacMansions on MacQuasars, yet bad news falls from terra firma’s firmament without let-up.  Sadly the human record  seems to tell us our’s is a conflict without resolution, a condition without a cure.

It’s deja vu cloned and cubed.

What we’re caught up in is the eternal call of the moment wrestling with our obsession with the unknown. Instant gratification chronically usurping future returns.  In modern 1st world parlance, it’s like being strapped to a table in a fast food joint wolfing juicy supersizes with fries until we’re bigger than Jupiter, instead of getting out there and exploring Jupiter.  It’s an endless state of affairs.  We might as well be Sysiphus, and this dilemma our rolling stone.  God knows we need the exercise.

More here.

From Discover:

SOMETIMES, WHEN THINGS GET SUFFICIENTLY WEIRD, SUBTLETY NO longer works, so i’ll be blunt:  The gleaming device I am staring at in the corner of a machine shop in San Rafael, California, is the most audacious machine ever built. It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do—run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth’s axis.

Made of stone and steel, it is more sculpture than machine. And, like all fine timepieces, it is outrageously expensive. No one will reveal even an approximate price tag, but a multibillionaire financed its construction, and it seems likely that shallower pockets would not have sufficed.

Der Standard (via Sign and Sight) looks at the politically charged issue of asylum seekers (refugees) in Europe in this interview with the Portuguese journalist, Paulo Moura on African refugees in Morocco.

Der Standard: In recent years, the EU has let it be known it has plans to create outposts for African refugees in North Africa. Haven’t these outposts existed for a long time now?

Paulo Moura: Yes, as informal camps. In general, the refugees see it as their right to solve the problem as they see fit. What is certain is that they want to come to Europe, and there is nothing that can change their minds. They live to reach Europe. So it wouldn’t be a good idea to set up such camps. The last time I was in one of these “underground camps” in a forest near Ceuta, a refugee leader said that the official outposts wouldn’t change the refugees’ condition one bit. The money would be used for the local people of the country in question. “Official” camps only serve to give Europeans a clear conscience.

Morocco receives financial aid from the EU. What impact does this have? Are institutions in place that supervise this money flow?

The country receives money to solve problems where they occur. But the way this is done is unacceptable. Prison conditions are miserable, and the jails are filled to overflowing. Thousands of people continue to live and die in the forests and deserts, and nothing is done to stop it. And the system of corruption in Morocco pervades every level – from the government to the police to the military. So it’s impossible to exercise control.

Agee’s film criticism sounds like that too, a calculated yet self-exceeding improvisation. Its culmination is the twenty-five-page essay he wrote for Life in September 1949 titled “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Agee’s premise was simple: “As soon as the screen began to talk, silent comedy was pretty well finished.” In a Bob Hope film, “the fun slackens between laughs like a weak clothesline.” What Agee loved in silent movies was the same thing that he loved in nineteenth-century daguerreotypes and New Orleans jazz, an unselfconscious authenticity of the kind Schiller called “naïve” rather than sentimental. Agee began his essay in a mock-analytic mode: “In the language of screen comedians four of the main grades of laugh are the titter, the yowl, the bellylaugh and the boffo. The titter is just a titter. The yowl is a runaway titter. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure knows all about a bellylaugh. The boffo is the laugh that kills.” Agee examined the smiles of the great comedians: Harold Lloyd’s “thesaurus of smiles” which “could at a moment’s notice blend prissiness, breeziness and asininity,” or Buster Keaton–the “most deeply ‘silent’ of the silent comedians”–whose smile “was as deafeningly out of key as a yell.” The twitchings of Harry Langdon’s clueless face “were signals of tiny discomforts too slowly registered by a tinier brain; quick, squirty little smiles showed his almost prehuman pleasures, his incurably premature trustfulness.” And then there was Chaplin, some kind of ultimate for Agee: “Of all comedians he worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realization of what a human being is, and is up against.”

more from TNR here.