any museum, really . . . subscribe[s] to an identical hushed-bank-vault authoritarianism that practically screams out for a more humanly scaled sensory corrective. And though contemporary-art museums occasionally break down and incorporate some audio artist’s work into their programming, or someone at a museum of cultural anthropology will set a low-volume loop of powwow songs running behind a tepee diorama, it rarely results in the kind of subjective experiential transformation you get from, say, looking at a roomful of Pollocks to the tune of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

And then along comes the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum’s attempt to harness this very niche of personal-reality modification using rentable infrared-sensitive headsets. Part of what makes “Sonic Scenery” so remarkable is its total unlikeliness. It isn’t that it’s such a radical idea — Morton Feldman’s 1971 Rothko Chapel is probably the most famous in a lineage of synesthetic art-making with roots dating back at least as far as Wagner and the multimedia extravaganzas of Diaghilev. In recent years, local interdisciplinary virtuoso Steve Roden composed site-specific soundtracks for, among other locales, Rudolph Schindler’s King’s Road House. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum commissioned soundtracks from a dozen or so contemporary musicians and artists for its 2004 exhibit “Shhh!” But the success of “Sonic Scenery” lies in the improbable fusing of unapologetic dorkiness and unimpeachable hippitude.

more from Doug Harvey at The LA Weekly here.

From Scientific American:

An international team of astronomers has discovered a new class of stars–massively compressed old neutron stars that seem inactive but for intermittent bursts of radio waves. Dubbing them rotating radio transients (RRATs), the researchers note that their isolated outbursts last for as few as two milliseconds and are separated by gaps as long as three hours.

“These things were very difficult to pin down,” says Dick Manchester of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Australia Telescope National Facility. “For each object we’ve been detecting radio emissions for less than one second a day. And because these are single bursts, we’ve had to take great care to distinguish them from terrestrial radio interference.” Given the fact that the single, 35-minute observation that first revealed these new stars had only a roughly 20 percent chance of catching one of these outbursts, there may be as many as five times more of these RRATs than the 100,000 or so constant pulsars in the Milky Way.

More here.

From Nature:

Next month, biologist Erik Born will be wielding a crossbow and firing satellite tags into the hides of walruses, having manoeuvred his rubber dinghy through the pack ice off western Greenland. By tagging the walruses, Born will be able to track the animals’ movements and behaviour from afar over several years. He will keep an eye on them using the same free Internet tool that has opened the eyes of millions to the possibilities of digital geography (and the sight of their house from above) — the Google Earth virtual globe. When the walruses migrate in the spring, Born and anyone else with a copy of the Google Earth software and a decent Internet connection, will be able to follow their westerly path to Baffin Island or the Canadian coast, and their return.

To the casual user, of which it has attracted millions since its launch last June, the appeal of Google Earth is the ease with which you can zoom from space right down to street level, with images that in some places are sharp enough to show individual people. Its popularity with a growing number of scientists lies in the almost-equal ease with which it lets them lay data with a spatial component on top of background imagery — a trick they can repeat with multiple data sets. By offering researchers an easy way into GIS software, Google Earth and other virtual globes are set to go beyond representing the world, and start changing it.

More here.

Tony Rothman in American Scientist:

The central fixture of Einstein lore is that the lowly patent clerk conjured from pure thought not only his theories but also the questions they answered. Not quite: Einstein himself helped foster this myth (more through carelessness than design, one suspects) by being less than fastidious about providing references in his papers, and since then credulous scientists have equated absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Physicists are notorious for taking history on faith, but none is required to prove this point—the evidence is in plain sight if one cares to look. The papers of Einstein and his contemporaries, as well as Einstein’s letters, are published. Anyone who reads them quickly realizes that Einstein had a very good sense of the currents of science swirling about him and once or twice relied on the insights of colleagues.

More here.

One of the blogs that we at 3QD like very much, in terms of both its form and content, is A Fistful of Euros. We have made it into the top ten finalists in their “Best Non-European Weblog” category of annual web awards. It would certainly be nice to win, and might even get us some desperately needed attention. If, and only if, you think we deserve it, please click here, scroll down to the “Best Non-European Weblog” category and vote for us. Or vote for whomever else you think is most deserving there.

Thanks!

Alan Boyle at MSNBC:

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh devised 40 pickup lines, drawn from film, TV, books of one-liners and other sources. All of the scenarios involved a male “chatting up” a female. Some of them took a humorous, even risque approach. Others were compliments (for example, “Your eyes are blue, like the ocean. And baby, I’m lost at sea”). Still others capitalized on the picker-upper’s familiarity with culture, or highlighted his character or wealth. Even the direct “wanna have sex” approach was included. (You can see the whole list here.) …

For the most part, the sappy compliments and the risque humor fell dead-flat. “Wanna have sex?” ranked 30th on the list of 40.

In contrast, the top-rated pickup lines weren’t “lines” at all, but scenarios in which a man lent aid to a woman at a bus stop, or sought her advice in buying a watch, or commented on a painting at an art gallery.

“As anticipated, opening gambits which revealed wealth, and those demonstrating personal qualities such as generosity, the ability to take charge, and physical fitness, were judged likely to appeal to women,” the researchers wrote. “In line with the mating mind hypothesis, gambits displaying a cultured background or artistic talent were also judged likely to be effective.”

So what’s the perfect pickup line? Based on this research, a woman colleague here at MSNBC.com suggested: “Running the marathon made me too distracted to manage my hedge fund today, but can I help you with your coat?”

More here.

Dear Carly,

Nice song. Wow, you really stuck it to me, eh? Yes, ma’am.

Jesus, you are one bitter woman, Carly Simon.

Listen, I’m pretty busy right now with high-profile meetings and social engagements, but there were things I simply could not let stand.

First of all, that party took place on a yacht. So the way I walked in was perfectly appropriate. In fact, there is a certain way that one is expected to conduct oneself in such a situation. I could explain but I doubt you’re interested. As for the apricot scarf and the tilted hat, again, perfectly appropriate for a maritime soiree. Look it up. I’m sorry you had a problem with that. Funny, there were plenty of girls that night who certainly had no quarrel.

Secondly, yes, I went up to Saratoga for an important horserace. And yes, my horse won, thanks to years of training and the hard work of all the people involved. Is this a bad thing? And yes, I did take the jet to Nova Scotia. I would do it again in an instant. Have you ever seen the total eclipse of the sun, Carly? It’s one of the most amazing natural phenomena one could witness, so, if I have the means to see it, I don’t see that as vanity, I see it as being fully alive. I also took 35 orphans up there with me, free of charge, but there’s nothing about that in your song. All right, I didn’t really do that. But I thought about it and that’s what matters.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Another and altogether different approach to media critique is manifest in Poslednji dani Deda Mraza (The Last Days of Santa Claus), 2001, an impressive painting by Biljana Đurđević. The corpse of a paunchy middle-aged man is laid out on a wooden table in an old-fashioned morgue, his figure foreshortened and stretching diagonally across the picture plane. His red coat, trimmed with white fur, has fallen open to reveal a grayish undershirt and briefs. He sports fashionable sunglasses, as if transported to his resting place straight from a nearby shopping mall. The young, Belgrade-based Đurđević, one of the few artists in “On Normality” who is widely known outside of Serbia, has invested little empathy in her rendering of this corpse. Rather, Đurđević’s baroque, necrophiliac realism comes across as a scrupulously unflinching, unforgiving, and perhaps even vengeful study in disillusionment. It doesn’t take much of a leap to read this postmortem as a response to a society that counts graphic images of dead bodies among its infotainment staples, sustaining itself through a politics of fear practiced by both ideologues and organized crime bosses.

more from Artforum here.

From The Guardian:

Love is blossoming in the British Library – and not just in the secluded corners of Humanities 2. Crouching beneath a walkway on the far wall of the foyer, a small selection of books, manuscripts, sketches and other memorabilia charts the life of Britain’s favourite love poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. After all, unless you’ve delivered a hand-crafted valentine with specially written love poem, unveiled a surprise sequence of sonnets charting the growth of your devotion and arranged an escape from the “vile slavery” your paramour suffers under in their parental abode, well … does it really count?

The love story between Elizabeth and Robert is charming enough to melt the heart of the most determined cynic. They first met in 1845 after exchanging compliments on each other’s poetry, then began corresponding – despite her father’s disapproval – before marrying and eloping to Italy in 1846, where, naturally, they lived happily ever after.

The bond I undertake to seek
exchanges comforts
found from understanding
and being understood
although
when I gaze upon your form
I see emotion as a mirage

you, the one love
who will never truly stand before me.

Your flesh can be only touched
in dreams
when reality comes alive
in epic tales, played out nightly
or in that half snooze state
I sometimes get to fool around in

A world where my desire
for you can be indulged.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Forget about opposites attracting. We like people who look like us, because they tend to have personalities similar to our own. And, a new study suggests, the longer we are with someone, the more similarities in appearance grow. Researchers set out to investigate why couples often tend to resemble one another. They asked 11 male and 11 female participants to judge the age, attractiveness and personality traits of 160 real-life married couples. Photographs of husbands and wives were viewed separately, so the participants didn’t know who was married to whom.

The test participants rated men and woman who were actual couples as looking alike and having similar personalities. Also, the longer the couples had been together, the greater the perceived similarities. The researchers speculate that the sharing of experiences might affect how couples look.

“Testosterone is linked to masculine face shapes and it also affects behavior,” Little told LiveScience. “Also, the face displays our emotions and over time emotional expressions may become written in the face.” For example, someone who smiles a lot may develop lines and muscles that are suggestive of someone who is happy.

More here:

Charles Rosen reviews The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin, in the New York Review of Books:

A history of Western music is, more or less, a history of all the music that has a history—that is, a large body of musical works that stretch from a distant past to the present through a series of stylistic revolutions. Other civilizations, India in particular, have magnificent musical traditions, but few authentic, documented musical works survive from their past. Only in the West was there an elaborate system of notation that delivered the musical artifacts of more than a millennium to the future, and, as a consequence, only in the West has there been an extravagant historical development from the Gregorian chant of the tenth century to the symphonic complexities of Wagner and Stravinsky, and the contested triumphs of modernism. Western music, in short, has a history that can be placed in richness and complexity by the side of a history of literature and a history of the visual arts.

More here.

Helen Pearson in Nature:

Idlers, loafers and layabouts, listen up. A new study suggests that the times when we sit around twiddling our thumbs could in fact be vital for learning.

The idea stems from experiments in which neuroscientists eavesdropped on the brains of rats as they explored their environments. They found that the rats’ brains ‘replay’ their experiences in reverse when the animals pause briefly to rest.

The scientists, David Foster and Matthew Wilson working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, inserted a pincushion of fine wires into the animals’ skulls. These allowed the team to simultaneously monitor the electrical activity of around 100 individual brain cells in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory.

The researchers placed each wired-up rat in a straight 1.5-metre run. They recorded brain-cell activity as the rats scurried up and down, pausing at each end to eat, groom and scratch their whiskers.

As the rats ran along the track, the nerve cells fired in a very specific sequence. This is not surprising, because certain cells in this region are known to be triggered when an animal passes through a particular spot in a space.

But the researchers were taken aback by what they saw when the rats were resting. Then, the same brain cells replayed the sequence of electrical firing over and over, but in reverse and speeded up.

More here.

Terry Teachout in Commentary:

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. Yet the Beatles and their music continue to fascinate successive generations of music lovers, so much so that more than two dozen books have been published about them, the latest of which is a thousand-page biography by the journalist Bob Spitz.

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.

Such an appraisal must begin by taking into account the fact that the Beatles were the first rock-and-roll musicians to be written about as musicians.

More here.

Paul Richard in the Washington Post:

All depictions of Muhammad — or so we hear daily — are now and have always been forbidden in Islam. Art’s history disputes this. True, that strict taboo today is honored now by almost all Muslims, but old paintings of the prophet — finely brushed expensive ones, made carefully and piously by Muslims and for them — are well known to most curators of Islamic art.

There are numerous examples in public institutions in Istanbul, Vienna, Edinburgh, London, Dublin, Los Angeles and New York…

These portrayals of Muhammad are not big or new or common. Most were made for the elite. And most were bound in books. These were lavish volumes that were political in purpose, and were designed to celebrate and dignify self-promoting rulers. What their paintings show is this: Once upon a time — in the era of the caliphs and the sultans and the shahs, when the faithful felt triumphant, and courtly learning blossomed — the prophet did appear in great Islamic art.

Old portrayals of Muhammad come from Sunni lands and Shia ones, from the Turkey of the Ottomans, the India of the Mughals, from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran. The oldest that survive were painted circa 1300.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

With the aid of a tiny device that works like the needle on the arm of a record player, a scientist has pumped up the sounds made by tiny proteins zipping around inside a yeast cell. The discovery is driving the development of a new tool that may allow doctors to detect diseases like cancer by listening to the sounds of their patients’ bodies, said James Gimzewski, a biochemistry professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gimzewski discovered cell sounds using a device called an atomic force microscope. But he says the name is a misnomer. “It’s not a microscope that you look through a lens to see something … [I]t’s kind of a paradigm shift in a way, from looking at things to a form of feeling them,” he said. The device has a very sharp tip that is attached to a spring, like the needle on a record player.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The report, from a huge federal study called the Women’s Health Initiative, raises important questions about how much even the most highly motivated people can change their eating habits and whether the relatively small changes that they can make really have a substantial effect on health. The study, of nearly 49,000 women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet or not, found that the diet did not make a significant difference in development of two cancers or heart disease. Still the study’s results frustrate our primal urge to control our destinies by controlling what we put in our mouths. And when it comes to this urge, it is remarkable how history repeats itself. Over and over again, medical experts and self-styled medical experts have insisted that one diet or another can prevent disease, cure chronic illness and ensure health and longevity. And woe unto those who ignore such dietary precepts.

More here.

Terry Eagleton reviews For Lust of Knowing: the orientalists and their enemies by Robert Irwin, in the New Statesman:

Irwin is not the kind of commentator to dismiss Said as “a dandy and a Manhattan bon viveur“, as the pompously self-opinionated Ernest Gellner once did. On the contrary, he praises him with an agreeable old-school courtesy wherever praise seems due. He shares Said’s belief, for example, that US media coverage of Palestinian affairs has been “biased, ignorant and abusive”, and acknowledges his unswerving rejection of terrorist violence. Incredulous though he is at the idea that orientalism is in cahoots with western imperialism, he is quick to register the odd spot of anti-Islamic prejudice in Middle Eastern scholarship. He also jovially admits that the 16th-century Frenchman Guillaume Postel was not only the first true orientalist but a complete lunatic.

It would be hard to imagine any such generosity of spirit from the smug US Middle Eastern observer Thomas Friedman, who, despite writing a column for the New York Times, has about as much a sense of literary style as a rhino. Or, indeed, from a right-wing orientalist scholar such as Bernard Lewis, who has written that the destruction of the World Trade Center was one of the most wicked acts in human history. Why such coy understatement? Why not just confess straight out that the joint crimes of Stalin, Mao and Hitler, not to speak of Hiroshima and Attila the Hun, are utterly eclipsed by it?

More here.  [Photo shows Edward Said.]

From Slate:

Edward. O. Wilson long ago abandoned the fundamentalist Christianity of his upbringing, but you wouldn’t know it to observe his lifestyle. He assiduously avoids vice, stays faithful to his wife, and pursues his calling as if John Calvin were supervising. Here the world-famous biologist explains how to live right without the carrot-and-stick of heaven-and-hell. And it isn’t just that he doesn’t need the prospect of a blessed afterlife–he doesn’t want it. After all, he asks, do you have any idea how monotous eternal bliss would be? Still, he’s grateful for what his southern Baptist heritage gave him, notably including zeal.

More here.

Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker:

Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of a great religious art—the wheezing and worldly Renaissance Papacy produced the Sistine ceiling, while the young Apostolic Church left only a few scratched graffiti in the catacombs. In America, certainly, very little art has attached itself directly to our own dazzling variety of sects and cults, perhaps because true belief is too busy with eternity to worry about the décor. The great exception is the Shakers, who managed, throughout the hundred or so years of their flourishing, to make objects so magically austere that they continue to astonish our eyes and our sense of form long after the last Shakers stopped shaking. Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity. It is not a negative simplicity, either, a simplicity of gewgaws eliminated and ornament excised, which, like that of a distressed object found in a barn, appeals by accident to modern eyes trained already in the joys of minimalism. No, their objects show a knowing, creative, shaping simplicity, and to look at a single Shaker box is to see an attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bending eccentricity, which truly anticipates and rivals the bending organic sleekness of Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” or the algorithmic logic of Bauhaus spoons and forks. Shaker objects don’t look simple; they look specifically Shaker.

More here.

‘Like it or not, the “circus act” has always occupied a place, albeit a dubious one, in the boxing world.’

Charles Jay in Fox Sports:

For every Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard or Roy Jones Jr., moving about the ring with style, grace and fluidity, there’s a Mark Gastineau or Ed “Too Tall” Jones, clinging onto the fringes while offering little to the sport, save for the prospect of exploiting themselves, and the public, in the cheap pursuit of a buck or two.

But the proverbial boxing sideshow has, almost without exception, been just that — relegated to the side, safely distanced from that which would be looked upon as substantive, important, or mainstream within the industry.

Is that in the process of changing? Has one of the circus acts emerged to the point where it is positioned front and center in the landscape of what is traditionally boxing’s glamour division? And is it just a pathetic sign of the times in the depressed heavyweight picture?

These are the questions being asked in some corners of the fight game these days, inspired by the rise of a figure who may just be on the verge of boxing’s Holy Grail.

Nikolay Valuev is a giant of a man, standing at 7-foot (by most accounts anyway) and regularly weighing in at over 320 pounds. Though many people may not be aware of it, he is currently the heavyweight champion of the world, at least as far as the World Boxing Association is concerned.

More here.