Gary King in Social Science Statistics Blog (via Metamerist):

A few years ago, I taught the following lesson in my daughter’s kindergarden class and my graduate methods class in the same week. It worked pretty well in both. Anyone who has a kid in kindergarten, some good graduate students, or both, might want to try this. It was especially fun for the instructor.

To start, I hold up some nails and ask “does everyone likes to eat nails?” The kindergarten kids scream, “Nooooooo.” The graduate students say “No,” trying to look cool. I say I’m going to convince them otherwise.

I hand out a little magnet to everyone. I ask the class to figure out what it sticks to and what it doesn’t stick to. After a few minutes running around the classroom, the kindergardners figure out that magnets stick to stuff with iron in it, and anything without iron in it doesn’t stick. The graduate students sit there looking cool.

From behind the table, I pull out a box of Total Cereal (teaching is just like doing magic tricks, except that you get paid more as a magician). I show them the list of ingredients; “iron, 100 percent” is on the list. I ask by a show of hands whether this is the same iron as in the nails. 3 of 23 kindergarten kids say “yes”; 5 of 44 Harvard graduate students say “yes” (almost the same percent in both classes!).

I show the students that the box is sealed (and I have nothing up my sleeves), Then, I open the box, spill some cereal on a cutting board, and smash it up into tiny pieces with a rolling pin. I take the pile of cereal around the room and let the kids put their magnet next to it and see whether the cereal sticks to the magnet. To everyone’s amazement, it sticks!

Then I ask, are we now convinced that the iron in the nails is the same iron as in the cereal? All the kids in kindergarten and all the graduate students say “yes.”

More here.

From the Guardian:

To millions The Chronicles of Narnia are a childhood tale of wonder and triumph now made into a film that could inspire millions of children to read. To others, including the celebrated fantasy author Philip Pullman, they are stories of racism and thinly veiled religious propaganda that will corrupt children rather than inspiring them.

Either way, one thing is certain: this Christmas, and perhaps the next six, depending on sequels, everyone will be talking about Narnia. Disney is already in the middle of one of the biggest marketing campaigns in recent cinematic history. It is trying to lure both mainstream filmgoers and evangelical Christians, who will respond to CS Lewis’s parallels between his characters and the Bible. HarperCollins is set to publish 170 Lewis-related books in more than 60 countries, many of them Christian-themed works. Disney has hired Christian marketing groups to handle the film.

For Pullman, who is an avowed atheist and a critic of Lewis, that is bad news. ‘If the Disney Corporation wants to market this film as a great Christian story, they’ll just have to tell lies about it,’ Pullman told The Observer.

From BBC News:

Using its infra-red “eyes”, the Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a spectacular view of stars forming inside the dark depths of interstellar clouds. Visible-light images of the same region show dark towers fringed by halos of light. The stars inside are hidden by dust. But infrared light coming from the stars can escape through the dust, giving astronomers a new view of our galaxy. “We believe that the star clusters lighting up the tips of the pillars are essentially the offspring of the region’s single, massive star,” said Dr Lori Allen from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US.

“It appears that radiation and winds from the massive star triggered new stars to form.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

The all-glass, balcony-like “Skywalk”–shown in an illustration released this week–will extend over the edge of the Grand Canyon, 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) above the Colorado River. “The Skywalk will be an attraction unlike any other in the world,” said Sheri Yellowhawk, CEO of the Grand Canyon Resort Corporation. The company is building the bridge in the Hualapai Indian Reservation on the south rim of the canyon.

Andrew Nathan reviews Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in the London Review of Books:

As their subtitle proclaims, in virtually every chapter Chang and Halliday have turned up ‘unknown stories’ of Mao. Some, if true, will be big news for historians. Mao amassed a private fortune during the Jiangxi Soviet period; his troops fought only one real battle during the Long March; their break-out from Nationalist military encirclement was deliberately allowed by Chiang Kai-shek; the most famous battle of the Long March never took place; Mao attacked India in 1962 with the support of the Soviet Union.

Other scoops have important implications for Mao’s character. He poisoned a rival during the Yan’an period. He would send his own soldiers to be massacred if it would help him to move up the ranks of the Party. He took pleasure in the slow, agonising death of Liu Shaoqi. We already knew that Mao was selfish and ruthless. Chang and Halliday add that he was a brutal, sadistic power-monger lacking in vision or ideals, comfort-loving and often lazy, riding the revolution to power to satisfy a lust for torture and sex.

More here.

From Smithsonian Magazine‘s 35th Anniversary issue:

Wynton Marsalis — By Tom Piazza
Margaret Burbidge — By Marcia Bartusiak
Bill Gates — By Jimmy Carter
Mark Plotkin — By Elizabeth Royte
Richard Leakey — By Virginia Morell
Annie Leibovitz — By Sarah Boxer
Clyde Roper — By Richard Ellis
Jane Mt. Pleasant — By Gary Paul Nabhan
Andy Goldsworthy — By Arthur Lubow
Robert Langridge — By Terence Monmaney
Daphne Sheldrick — By Douglas Chadwick
Julie Taymor — By Edward Rothstein
Wendell Berry — By Paul Trachtman
Edward O. Wilson — By Robert Wright
John Dobson — By Don Moser
Mark Lehner — By Alexander Stille
Sally Ride — By K.C. Cole
Gordon Parks — By Roy Rowan
D.A. Henderson — By Robin Marantz Henig
Renée Fleming — By Stephen Hastings
David Attenborough — By Frans Lanting
Tim Berners-Lee — By Tom Standage
James Watson — By Horace Freeland Judson
Wes Jackson — By Craig Canine
Maya Angelou — By Richard Long
Yo-Yo Ma — By Joshua Kosman
Daniel H. Janzen — By Jerry Adler
Ed Bearss — By Adam Goodheart
Frank Gehry — By Robert Duffy
Janis Carter — By Douglas Foster
Robert Moses — By Neil Henry
Maya Lin — By Michael Parfit
Douglas Owsley — By Aaron Elkins
Chuck Close — By Arthur C. Danto
This article is not available online.
Steven Spielberg — By Kenneth Turan

Giles Worsley in The New Statesman:

For years, Zaha Hadid’s architecture was problematic. Her ideas were stunning, particularly when ex-pressed as large paintings full of what seemed like exploding buildings, sharp angles and jagged planes, but many found it hard to believe that they could ever be built. From 1982, when she first sprang to fame winning the competition for The Peak, a mix of private club and apartments set high above Hong Kong, through to the debacle of the Cardiff Bay Opera House in 1994 (it was expected to win a Lottery grant but failed to do so and was cancelled), Hadid enjoyed immense critical acclaim and cult status among students, but frustration when it came to building. She managed to complete only one project, a little fire station at the Vitra furniture works near Basel. She appeared doomed to remain a paper architect, the fate of the great early-20th-century Russian suprematist Kasimir Malevich, who was such an influence on her.

Today, however, she seems omnipresent. Ever since she completed her first major building, the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati in 2003, which brought her the prestigious Pritzker Prize the following year, Hadid has been unstoppable.

More here.

Sam Anderson in Slate:

It’s fitting that the comedian Sarah Silverman’s impending cultural moment—high-profile film, ongoing miniscandal, TV series in the making—is going to coincide with serious public moralizing about the sexual orientation of penguins. Silverman’s work is a natural byproduct of the high-stakes game of contemporary American identity politics—the emotionally volatile generalizing about our moral right to generalize. But she’s not just a critic of PC culture: She’s a connoisseur. She handles the complex algorithms of taboo—who’s allowed to joke about what, to whom, using what terminology—with instant precision: “Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.” (The joke exposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but the absurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes are thought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: “I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.” A Playboy interviewer, probing for something salacious, once asked Silverman if she had a nickname for her vagina. She answered “Faggot”—a throwaway joke that manages to kink sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Douglas Kern in Tech Central Station:

Yet in recent years, interest in the UFO phenomenon has withered. Oh, the websites are still up, the odd UFO picture is still taken, and the usual hardcore UFO advocates make the same tired arguments about the same tired cases, but the thrill is gone. What happened? Why did the saucers crash?

The Internet showed this particular emperor to be lacking in clothes. If UFOs and alien visitations were genuine, tangible, objective realities, the Internet would be an unstoppable force for detecting them. How long could the vast government conspiracy last, when intrepid UFO investigators could post their prized pictures on the Internet seconds after taking them? How could the Men in Black shut down every website devoted to scans of secret government UFO documents? How could marauding alien kidnappers remain hidden in a nation with millions of webcams?

Just as our technology for finding and understanding UFOs improved dramatically, the manifestations of UFOs dwindled away. Despite forty-plus years of alleged alien abductions, not one scrap of physical evidence supports the claim that mysterious visitors are conducting unholy experiments on hapless victims. The technology for sophisticated photograph analysis can be found in every PC in America, and yet, oddly, recent UFO pictures are rare. Cell phones and instant messaging could summon throngs of people to witness a paranormal event, and yet such paranormal events don’t seem to happen very often these days.

More here.

Pascal Bruckner in The New Republic:

France, they say, only reforms under the cover of revolution. Here, rebellion precedes dialogue, strikes precede negotiations, and recourse to violence is systematic. This is a country where authority has always assumed the face of the Jacobin state–of a paternal figure who reacts only to threat or attack. In this way, the young rioters in the French suburbs are far more French than many commentators presume. The troubled suburbs are not foreign lands within the Republic, but rather are increasingly a mirror of all French passions, the best as well as the worst–a reserve of talent and energy, but also a melting pot of racism, homophobia, machismo, and anti-Semitism. That is the enigma: These towns behave as if they are under siege by France, which herself behaves like she is under siege by the world. 

The juvenile rioters–some are barely twelve or thirteen–are French-born; they want to make something of themselves but feel trapped on the wrong side of an invisible window as they watch their compatriots succeed, work, and travel. They don’t burn cars out of hatred of capitalist society, as the children of the bourgeoisie did in May 1968. Rather, they do it because they want into that society–they want one of those BMWs or Mercedeses they see around the city, and they cannot afford one. The very vehicles they burn symbolize social mobility, and their lack of it.

More here.

Karen C. Fox in Science & Spirit:

In 1890, a visitor to the Einstein home in Munich, Germany, would have found a bright eleven-year-old boy going through what any parent today would term “a phase.” His largely assimilated parents—Herr Hermann Einstein was fond of boasting that no Jewish laws were followed in his house—had hired a Jewish tutor for their young son in an effort to counter the Christian lessons he was taught at school. Einstein, perhaps foreshadowing the all-consuming passions he would display as an adult, threw himself wholeheartedly into these new teachings. Imagine what his stunned parents thought as he doggedly studied the Bible, demanded kosher meals, and joyfully sang songs he had composed to God.

This time period was, Einstein once said, his “religious paradise”—a fascinating turn of phrase for a man who would soon reject organized religion completely. Even through the filter of an adult mind that disdained any form of groupthink, there must have been some nostalgia for the time in his life when explanations of the world were handed out ready-made, when truth seemed simple and attainable.

Einstein consistently said his religious period ended the day he discovered science. That discovery was hastened by medical student Max Talmey, a regular guest at the Einsteins’ dinner table, who lent the young pupil a variety of books on medicine, math, and philosophy. As if flipping a switch in his head, Einstein instantly relegated all the religion he’d learned to a set of fantastic myths at best, outright lies at worst.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

This week in the magazine, Atul Gawande writes about who pays the price when patients sue doctors. Here, with Daniel Cappello, he talks about the costs and consequences of medical malpractice.

DANIEL CAPPELLO: Is the number of malpractice cases in this country on the rise?

ATUL GAWANDE: There has been a rise, especially if you look at the past forty years. There’s been an increase in malpractice claims all over the world. In the past ten or fifteen years, what has really increased is not the number of cases but the number that are settled in the million-dollar-plus range. And that’s what has helped bring it into the headlines more and more. I’m not convinced that this is different from other kinds of litigation involving products and services in our country—we’re a litigious society, and this is part of a larger debate about responsibility for mishaps, especially in high-risk activities.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Most filmgoers may not know the name Jem Cohen, but many of them have probably seen his work without knowing it. For more than 20 years, the New York-based filmmaker has been an observant vagabond, turning his camera on the American and global landscape to create poetic reflections on the most alienated aspects of the contemporary human experience. His most highly regarded work has been shown in world-class museums; in fact, one of those installations, “Lost Book Found,” featured a sequence starring an errant plastic bag that would be quoted a few years later in the Oscar-winning film “American Beauty.” In Cohen’s newest film, “Chain,” which will be shown tonight at the Hirshhorn Museum, the worlds he has traveled in for the past two decades seem finally to have meshed and merged, in a film that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, personal essay and political polemic, formal rigor and punk rock spontaneity. The film stars the Japanese actress Miho Nikaido (“Tokyo Decadence,” “Flirt”) as a Japanese executive and Mira Billotte, of the District-based band Quix*o*tic, as an itinerant worker and squatter. Despite their different stations in life, they’re both adrift in a generic, nameless landscape. As in his previous films, Cohen invokes the critic and dedicated wanderer Walter Benjamin in “Chain,” but he also acknowledges Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Nickel and Dimed.”

The result is a haunting portrait of two women who embody the alienation, abandonment and grudging optimism of the 21st-century economy.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A chemical compound in wine reduces levels of a harmful molecule linked to Alzheimer’s disease. In a recent study, resveratrol–one of several antioxidants found in wine–helped human cells break down the molecule, which contributes to the lesions found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Fortunately for teetotalers, the compound is also found elsewhere. “Resveratrol is a natural polyphenol occurring in abundance in several plants, including grapes, berries and peanuts,” says author Philippe Marambaud of the Litwin-Zucker Research Center for the Study of Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders in Manhasset, N.Y. “The polyphenol is found in high concentrations in red wines.”

The scientists found that 40 micromoles (a measure of the amount of resveratrol in a liter of solution) cut levels of the Alzheimer’s-associated molecules–amyloid-beta peptides–by more than half. Treatment with proteasome-inhibitors nullified the benefit. The team thinks therefore that the substance works by boosting the effectiveness of the proteasome–a multi-protein complex that breaks down other proteins inside a cell. These findings will be published in the November 11 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

More here.

For the new Arab public, the fundamental challenge today is not to shatter more taboos or ask more questions but to offer solutions. Al-Jazeera’s talk shows have given a forum to voices both moderate and extreme. The shows often err on the side of sensationalism and false oppositions, inviting conflict rather than reasonable compromise. In the short term, the station may well have strengthened anti-American sentiment in the region. But in a longer view, al-Jazeera is building the foundations of a pluralist political culture. By replacing stifling consensus with furious public arguments and secrecy with transparency, al-Jazeera and its Arab competitors are creating perhaps the most essential underpinning of liberal democracy: a free and open critical public space, independent of the state, where citizens can speak their piece and expect to be heard.

The world will continue to argue about whether the invasion of Iraq was necessary for the current democratic ferment in the Middle East. But al-Jazeera was most assuredly necessary. Shutting it down or muffling its voice might give Americans some short-term satisfaction, but to do either would also take away one of the most powerful weapons in the hands of Arab democratic reformers.

more from The Wilson Quarterly here.

You’re reading, reading a book, and when you’re not reading it, you mark your place. Maybe you simply use the book-jacket flap; if it’s a disposable book or you’re just a heathen, you fold the page corner down. But you usually mark the page with a foreign object, anything from a shred of newspaper to a strip of embossed leather someone bought you at Stonehenge. Often you don’t have much of a choice—because you also have a life outside of that reading, a life of rocket-launched inconvenience and impromptu upheaval, you often have to use whatever’s at hand to hold your space. Indeed, if you have children, then you know interruption like Priam knew Greeks hammering at his door for years and are usually rewarded for your endurance with an array of glitter-and-yarn craft-class bookmarks. But where are they now? You have to put that book down because the dog’s tongue is suddenly stuck to the freezer rack, or the urologist’s nurse has just called you in, or you’re suddenly at your stop and so will end up hustling off the train in a wad of shuffling commuters with only your finger inserted into the book’s crevice.

more from The Believer here.

A review of Iwan Rhys Morus’ When Physics Became King, in The American Scientist.

[T]he majority of the book is dedicated to the analysis of 19th-century British physics. For example, he discusses how a dozen upstart mathematics students at the University of Cambridge during the 1810s, including John Herschel, Charles Babbage and George Peacock, adopted the new mathematical analysis of the French and founded the Analytical Society. These lads wished to wrestle British science away from the grasps of aristocratic gentlemen—epitomized by the president of the Royal Society of London, Sir Joseph Banks—in order to reform both science and society. They maintained that meritocracy, rather than nepotism, was required for physics and the economy to flourish. Babbage and Herschel were committed to maximizing the efficiency of both mental labor and British manufacturing. Efficiency was applicable to both physics and business, or as Morus argues, “Efficiency was the name of the game in both cases, and efficiency was best achieved by due attention to, and proper application of, the laws of nature and the operations of the mind.”

Mathematics was believed to discipline the mind. The Analytical Society wanted to revolutionize the mathematical Tripos at Cambridge by having it cover French analytical calculus. Peacock eventually became one of the university’s examiners and accomplished this expansion of scope. By the middle of the 19th century, the Tripos had been overhauled, rendering it much more rigorous, with grueling written tests after the third year. Only those with a sharp mind, combined with physical stamina and the assistance of a good tutor (referred to as a “coach”), could survive. Posh accents (indicative of good breeding), which in the 18th century had been noted approvingly in oral exams, could no longer assist those who were ill prepared.

Ashis Nandy looks at Freud, modernity and post-colonial violence (though entitled “Frued [sic], modernity and postcolonial violence”) in The Little Magazine.

Today modernity, to qualify as such, requires an element of self-criticism or at least a sense of loss. The problem is compounded by the various schools of post-Freudian psychology, which are mostly progenies of the theoretical frames that crystallised as forms of dissent within the Enlighten ment. Even when they defy the modern, the defiance is primarily addressed to and remains confined within the citadels of modernity. The ones that try to break out of the grid often turn out to be transient fashions of brief shelf life. A culture not only produces its own ideas of conformity but also its distinctive concepts of valid or sane dissent. Worse, what looks like dissent in one culture at one time may not appear so in another culture at another time.

In Art Forum, a review of Russia! at the Guggenheim.

Russian Constructivism, the movement most favored in the West, is represented here by Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Stenberg, who have in effect been extracted from the vast pool of highly experimental artists working in multimedia production during the period immediately after the revolution. Indeed, they are positioned in a contextual vacuum not only in terms of their historical moment but also regarding their historical consequence. Both Rodchenko’s monochrome triptych Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color, 1921, the culmination of his anti-painting agenda, and Stenberg’s spatial construction Spiral, 1920, one of a handful of surviving works from the laboratory phase of Soviet Constructivism, should have provided the perfect opportunity to discuss the influence these works had on their American postwar successors (even if only on a wall text).

Such poor representation of revolutionary abstraction (ironic in the con-text of an institution formerly called the “Museum of Non-Objective Painting”) came about, I believe, due to the pressure that Russian collectors have brought to bear. Since the 1990s, the first generation of nouveau riche—known for favoring figurative representation—has been hunting after nineteenth-century paintings with far more devotion than abstract ones. This enthusiasm is reflected by the greater presence of such work here, and perhaps hints at the real impulses behind this show.

In the last issue of Gastronomica, Carol Wilson looks at the history of the wedding cake.

Since antiquity, weddings customarily have been celebrated with a special cake. Ancient Roman wedding ceremonies were finalized by breaking a cake of wheat or barley (mustaceum) over the bride’s head as a symbol of good fortune. The newly married couple then ate a few crumbs in a custom known as confarreatio—eating together. Afterwards, the wedding guests gathered up the crumbs as tokens of good luck. The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), wrote that the breaking of the cake over the bride’s head mellowed into crumbling the sweet wheat cakes over her head. After all the cakes were used up, the guests were supplied with handfuls of confetto, a sweet mixture of nuts, dried fruit, and honeyed almonds. These sweetmeats were an important part of the wedding banquet and continued to be so for hundreds of years. Chronicles of the period record that in 1487 over two hundred and sixty pounds of “confetti” were consumed at the banquet following the wedding of Lucrezia Borgia and Alfonso d’Este, son of Ercole i, Duke of Ferrara.