Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Two Australians have won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for establishing that bacteria cause stomach ulcers, it was announced on Monday.

Working at the Royal Perth Hospital, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren established beyond all doubt in the 1980s that Helicobacter pylori causes stomach ulcers by infecting and aggravating the gut lining.

Moreover, they showed that ulcers could be cured altogether by killing the bacteria with antibiotics. Hitherto, ulcers had been considered uncurable. Instead, patients’ symptoms were treated with a lifetime of drugs to reduce the acidity of the gut.

The pair’s claims provoked a fierce backlash from the medical establishment, which held to the dogma that ulcers were brought on by stress and lifestyle, and could not be cured. By revealing a simple cure, the researchers also threatened to destroy huge and lucrative global markets for the existing anti-ulcer drugs, which simply eased symptoms.

More here.

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

The theory of intelligent design, the purportedly more scientific descendant of creation science, rejects Darwin’s theory of evolution as being unable to explain the complexity of life. How, ask supporters of intelligent design, can biological phenomena like the clotting of blood have arisen just by chance?

A key supporter of intelligent design likens what he terms the “irreducible complexity” of such phenomena to the irreducible complexity of a mousetrap. If just one of the trap’s pieces is missing — whether it be the spring, the metal platform, or the board — the trap is useless. The implicit suggestion is that all the parts of a mousetrap would have had to come into being at once, an impossibility unless there were an intelligent designer.

Design proponents argue that what’s true for the mousetrap is all the more true for vastly more complex biological phenomena. If any of the 20 or so proteins involved in blood clotting is absent, clotting doesn’t occur, and so, the creationist argument goes, these proteins must have all been brought into being at once by a designer.

But the theory of evolution does explain the evolution of complex biological organisms and phenomena, and the above argument from design, which dates from the 18th century, has been decisively refuted. Rehashing the latter explanation and refutation is not my goal, however. Those who reject evolution are usually immune to such arguments anyway.

More here.

Mark M. Anderson in The Nation:

Are the former Allied nations willing to acknowledge German suffering and loss during World War II? Are they willing to question the morality of the means by which they won the war, even the firebombing that laid waste to 131 German cities and towns, and killed more than half a million people (most of them women, children and the elderly)? Or was the extremity of Nazi aggression so great, the urgency to defeat Hitler so compelling, that the Allies have effectively been shielded from the kind of moral scrutiny that has been focused on the use of atomic weapons against Japan? However one might answer those questions today, for much of the postwar period the occupying nations on both sides of the Berlin wall felt little reason to justify their actions. Germans grumbled mightily among themselves, but any public airing of their grievances was subject to severe constraints and cold war manipulation. And when the German children born during or shortly after the war came of age in the heady years of the late 1960s, they demanded that Germany view the war through the lens of non-German victims, not that of its own losses. German victimhood became politically incorrect.

More here.

“Are men more likely than women to be born with the potential for abstract brilliance in science, mathematics, the arts or music? Los Angeles correspondent Robert Lusetich reports on new research claims from the author of The Bell Curve.”

From The Australian:

The idea is as simple as its implications are seismic: women, as a group, lack the evolutionary genetic intelligence to master the highest strata of mathematics and the hard sciences. This is the central tenet of a contentious theory forwarded by famed US social scientist Charles Murray, who a decade ago made similarly explosive claims about the inferior genetic intelligence of blacks in his best-selling book The Bell Curve.

“It’s quite satisfying to see that I didn’t get nearly the hostile reaction I was expecting this time,” Murray says from his home near Washington. “After The Bell Curve, I was the Antichrist, so perhaps we have moved on and we can start looking at this data in an un-hysterical way.”

Perhaps. Another explanation may be that Murray has used up his 15 minutes of fame. Lisa Randall, an eminent Harvard theoretical physicist and cosmologist, had agreed to dissect Murray’s work, which appeared in the September issue of Commentary magazine in the US, for Inquirer but on reflection declined to respond. “The reason is that this just isn’t news and it’s not worthy of being covered,” she says. “If it really gets to the point where people accept it, I can explain the many logical fallacies in his piece.”

Murray counters with the shrug of a man who has heard it all before; he is fully prepared to take it on the chin from the “women’s studies crowd”.

“Universities are supposed to be places where we talk about these things, not run from them,” he says. “These are, in the end, questions of data, not my opinion.”

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was “very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view” and 4 was “undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be.” The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.

If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t abandon the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it.

More here.

Katharine Logan in Architecture Week:

A crisp, subtly articulated new form has risen among the towers of New York. The Helena, a 580-unit apartment building designed by FXFOWLE ARCHITECTS, formerly Fox & Fowle Architects, brings elegant design and sustainable technologies to a building type often underserved in both these regards.

As the first voluntarily sustainable highrise residential building in New York City, the Helena has won the AIA 2005 Green Affordable Housing Award from the American Institute of Architects. “It is a source of pride that the AIA has recognized the Helena as a new model of what a New York sustainable apartment building can and should be,” says Dan Kaplan, AIA, senior principal of FXFOWLE.

The Helena’s envelope of floor-to-ceiling glass, wrap-around windows, and metal panels weaves a shimmering pattern of opacity and reflection. With floor bands seeming from below to stretch on a bias across the building’s facets, the building looks taut and smart. Its understated formal composition, accented with a twist of the balcony and a tilt of the photovoltaics, balances verve with restraint: a welcome achievement in a building type that, as a supporting actor on the urban stage, often tries either too hard or not hard enough.

More here.

Paul Caponigro: Running White Deer, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1967.

Image from http://www.afterimagegallery.com/featurecaponigro.htm 
More about the artist here.

Noam Chomsky in the Boston Review:

Thirty-five years ago I agreed, in a weak moment, to give a talk with the title “Language and Freedom.” When the time came to think about it, I realized that I might have something to say about language and about freedom, but the word “and” was posing a serious problem. There is a possible strand that connects language and freedom, and there is an interesting history of speculation about it, but in substance it is pretty thin. The same problem extends to my topic here, “universality in language and human rights.” There are useful things to say about universality in language and about universality in human rights, but that troublesome connective raises difficulties.

The only way to proceed, as far as I can see, is to say a few words about universality in language, and in human rights, with barely a hint about the possible connections, a problem still very much on the horizon of inquiry.

More here.

Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post:

What if Freud had been a woman?

Sex would not be considered the primary force that drives human behavior. Instead, it would be Fear of Having a Large Behind. All men would be haunted by a condition known as “penis shame.” The mind would not be divided into the Id, the Ego and the Superego but the Shoe-Desire Region, the Weeping Center, and the If-You-Don’t-Know-What-You-Did-Wrong-I’m-Not-Going-to-Tell-You Lobe. Also, sometimes a dried apricot is just a dried apricot.

What if wishes were horses?

Then beggars would ride. But so would everyone else. We would each have, like, 7,000 horses. They would completely paralyze civilization, consuming all vegetable matter in a week or less. Continents would rise several feet, just from accumulated poo. And anytime anyone wished for no more horses, another horse would appear. The world would end in a terrifying, thundering apocalypse of horses, is what would happen.

What if Hitler had beaten us to the bomb?

Humor wäre heutzutage verboten, und Humoristen würde man in der Öffentlichkeit erschiessen.*

What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?

He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love. Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks.

What if our thoughts scrolled across our foreheads, like a TV news crawl?

More here.

Jenny Davidison has an interesting review of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in n+1.

“Like something from a fairy tale, three farfetched things had to happen before an 800-page literary fantasy by a British first-time novelist in her forties could shoot to the top of the bestseller lists. First, the success of the Harry Potter books gave credence to the idea that fantasy novels could be purchased by adults with no history of lurking in the sword-and-sorcery aisles at Barnes and Noble. Second, the internet matured as a place where serious readers and writers evaluate books and make recommendations to other readers. Since January, the comic-book writer, best-selling novelist, and influential blogger Neil Gaiman has praised Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell repeatedly, and partly as a result Clarke’s novel became a top-ten bestseller on Amazon more than a month before publication, with bound galleys reportedly fetching as much as $200 on eBay. The novel also made the Man Booker long-list in England, where the bookmaker William Hill now lists Jonathan Strange as the third favorite, just behind David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

One other condition remained, of course: the novel had to live up to its hype. And it does. Set in a version of early 19th-century England whose history reeks of magic, the novel recounts the numerous adventures of two rival magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, who try to revive magic in an England threatened by Napoleon from abroad and by social and political unrest at home.”

Darcy Argue has a new blog about music, music technology, upcoming shows in New York and the like. Secret Society:

“is the online home of Secret Society, a New York-based big band made up of 18 of my favorite co-conspirators, plus myself as ringleader. I will, of course, bring you news of all our musical endeavors, but I also hope also to encourage a community of friends, fans, and colleagues to gather here. I will be making as much of my music available as possible — live recordings, podcasts, scores, rehearsal excerpts, sketches, works in progress, thoughts on the compositional process, etc, with an eye to opening up discussion. I will be posting semi-regularly about music, politics, life in New York, and whatever shiny baubles happen to catch my eye.”

From The Observer (via Cosmic Variance):

64 per cent of people questioned for a recent poll said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution in schools, while 38 per cent favoured replacing evolution with creationism.

40 per cent of Americans believe God will eventually intervene in human affairs and bring about an end to life on Earth, according to a survey carried out in 2002. Of those believers, almost half thought this would occur in their lifetime with a return of Jesus from heaven.

1 adult American in five believes that the Sun revolves around Earth, according to one study carried out last summer.

80 per cent of Americans surveyed by the CNN TV news network believe that their government is hiding evidence of the existence of space aliens.

More here.

And a few intelligent words from an Episcopalian Bishop:

Intelligent Design is just one more smoke screen. The task of geologists and anthropologists is to study the sources of the life of this world. They should be free to follow wherever their scientific research carries them. If Christianity is threatened by truth, it is already too late to save it. Imagine worshiping a God so weak and incompetent that the Kansas School Board must defend this God from science and new learning. It is pitiful.

More here.

From Information Aesthetics:

The newest creation of Boris Müller, famous for his (yearly reoccuring) poetry visualizations: online, interactive applications that are capable of visualizing textual input into very beautiful graphics, so that every image is the direct representation of a specific text, which can then be directly used as book illustrations.
this year, an entire poem was considered to be a tree-like structure, that branches out over the page. attached to these branches are the words of the poems, represented by leaves. more specifically, particular symbols in a text control the growth of the tree: specific letter-combinations create a new branch, others make it grow stronger. words are visualised as leafs: the amount of letters in a word is represented by the number of spikes on a leaf, whereas the letter sequence in a word also controls the overall shape of a leaf, such as the roundness of the shapes, the length of the spikes & the density of the colour. the size of the leaves depends on the length of the poem.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

President Buchanan is reported to have said to President-elect Lincoln as they rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on the latter’s Inauguration Day: “My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [Buchanan’s Pennsylvania home], you are a happy man indeed.” But Abraham Lincoln did not expect to attain “happiness” in the White House or, as this intellectually energetic book shows, anywhere else. Lincoln’s Melancholy sounds again the half-forgotten, minor-key background music of his life. Joshua Wolf Shenk rejects the notion that Lincoln got over his melancholy under the demands of the presidency; his Lincoln is never too busy to be gloomy. And, drawing on modern studies of depression, Shenk even has a reference — humorous, I think — to “happiness” as a mental disorder.

More here.

From The Guardian:

For someone whose name has made headlines for the past 40 years, Roman Polanski is a bit of an Artful Dodger when it comes to his own publicity. At the outset it looks as though it will be a harder job to get Bill Sikes to go straight than to get Polanski to talk about his new film Oliver Twist. Since his libel victory over Vanity Fair, he has gone to ground at home in Paris, not even answering requests for interviews from a British press he believes has always had it in for him. I telephone his office and by sheer luck Polanski himself answers. ‘Why should I make an exception for you?’ he asks, in that voice fascinatingly poised between French and Polish. Because he’ll enjoy it, I tell him. ‘Bullshit,’ he replies. Then laughs.

As Charles Dickens knew so well, it’s amazing what a little laughter can do. A week later I am sitting opposite Polanski in L’avenue, a trendy restaurant situated among the Guccis and Chloes of smart Avenue Montaigne, just next door to where he lives with his third wife, the 39-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, Morgane, 12 and Elvis, 7.

‘I am widely renowned, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf,’ the director wrote in his 1984 autobiography Roman. But that was then. The Polanski I meet is an attractively rumpled family man with a thick head of grey hair, expensively creased linen jacket and trainers. While certainly small, he is slim and agile and, like many people who lost their childhood in the Holocaust, looks much younger than his real age, which is 72.

More here.

Tim Stoddard in Columbia Magazine:

Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Richard Axel followed his nose to the mysteries of smell and cracked the two great problems of olfaction: how the nose recognizes thousands of odors and how the brain knows what it’s smelling.

Slumping into the gray leather couch in his office, one leg draped over the armrest, Richard Axel admits that he was not the first to clone a nose. That distinction belongs to Woody Allen, who in 1973 regenerated a dead tyrant from a disembodied schnoz in the movie Sleeper. Axel, a University Professor of biochemistry, molecular biophysics, and pathology, shrugs and says, “Woody thought of it before me.”

Allen’s comic device has a whiff of scientific plausibility, as Axel recently demonstrated when he and others grew a mouse from a nose. To be accurate, the mouse was a clone, created by removing the genetic material from a nerve cell deep inside another mouse’s nose and injecting it into an empty egg. This elegant experiment was not really an homage to Sleeper, although Axel does refer to the zany movie in lectures on the science of smell. Nor was it a laboratory stunt. It was an important step toward unlocking the mysterious mechanisms of the mammalian olfactory system.

More here.

Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times:

What Margolick has accomplished in “Beyond Glory” is to provide an exhaustively researched background to the Louis-Schmeling rivalry that includes sympathetic portraits of both Joe Louis and Max Schmeling; an examination of racism at home and anti-Semitism in Germany; a look at the predominant role of Jews in professional boxing in the United States; and, interlarded through the text, opinions by just about anyone, from boxing experts and sportswriters to celebrities and ordinary, anonymous citizens, who might have had something to say about Louis or Schmeling that found its way into print, valuable or otherwise. Less cultural criticism than Margolick’s artfully focused “Strange Fruit,” “Beyond Glory” is historical reportage, a heavyweight of a book that is likely to be the definitive chronicle of its subject.

More here.  [This post dedicated to my favorite pugilist, Alan Koenig.]

Celeste Biever in New Scientist:

The brains of pathological liars have structural abnormalities that could make fibbing come naturally.

“Some people have an edge up on others in their ability to tell lies,” says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “They are better wired for the complex computations involved in sophisticated lies.”

He found that pathological liars have on average more white matter in their prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is active during lying, and less grey matter than people who are not serial fibbers. White matter enables quick, complex thinking while grey matter mediates inhibitions.

Raine says the combination of extra white matter and less grey matter could be giving people exactly the right mix of traits to make them into good liars. These are the first biological differences to be discovered between pathological liars and the general population.

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

Salman Rushdie’s two best books manage both these things – the big political picture and the telling individual detail – in different quantities. Midnight’s Children (1981) is a family story first and a political allegory about India second: a glorious reinvention of the Bombay of Rushdie’s childhood, of his own family stories (‘autobiography re-experienced as fairytale’, as Ian Hamilton put it). The exaggerations and magical touches are rooted in the characters and the story. Shame (1983), a savage satire about Pakistan, is a less personal and less peopled work, with a clear political message at its heart. But both, although baggy and prodigious, were anchored in subjects Rushdie knew intimately. Character and subject, like design and detail, were closely fused and passionately, originally imagined: they created something that could never be broken down into a mere message.

Perhaps understandably, these two great novels seem to have inspired Rushdie with a form of artistic megalomania. Since then, he has roved more freely, played faster and looser, written about anything and everything, and the results have never been as impressive. The Satanic Verses (1988), an interesting book with some brilliant passages, suffered from his belief that he could incorporate everything – from channel-hopping to the Prophet Muhammad’s flight to Medina, from advertising to race relations in Britain, from mountain-climbing to the nature of religious belief – into one all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza. The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), which was based more squarely in Bombay, was better. And it’s surely no coincidence that his truly terrible last novel, Fury (2001), was an outsider’s view of New York – which begins in superficial imitation of Saul Bellow (ex-wives, big ideas, trying to read the city and the times) and ends in God knows what (serial killers, puppets, ethnic strife in the South Pacific etc).

More here.

From Technology Review:

They are inventors and discoverers and entrepreneurs. They are chemists and biologists and software engineers and chip designers. They create their wonders in universities, startups, and large corporations. They gravitate to the most interesting and difficult scientific and engineering problems at hand, and arrive at solutions no one had imagined. They take on big issues. They are the TR35–Technology Review‘s selection of the top technology innovators under age 35 (as of October 1, 2005). The winners from previous years (when it was the TR100) have changed your world. So will the people you’re about to meet.

More here.