David Schoonmaker reviews The Best American Science Writing 2005, edited by Alan Lightman, in American Scientist:

Frank Wilczek’s scientific achievements are certainly familiar to me, but his popular writing was not. In “Whence the Force of F=ma?” the Nobelist explores his long-standing problem with the left-hand side of Newton’s second law. It had never occurred to me how insubstantial the concept of force is, so I was intrigued to learn that thinkers like Wilczek have been questioning its value to physics as a concept for more than a century. No less than Bertrand Russell titled the 14th chapter of his book The ABC of Relativity “The Abolition of Force.” Wilczek notes that “the concept of force is conspicuously absent from our most advanced formulations of the basic laws. It doesn’t appear in Schrödinger’s equation, or in any reasonable formulation of quantum field theory, or in the foundations of general relativity.”

Wilczek then gets to the nub of his concern: “If F=ma is formally empty, microscopically obscure, and maybe even morally suspect, what’s the source of its undeniable power?” His answer is that force is more a cultural concept than a physical one. “F=ma by itself does not provide an algorithm for constructing the mechanics of the world. The equation is more like a common language, in which different useful insights about the mechanics of the world can be expressed.”

Score one for risk taking. Frank Wilczek’s insights are worthy and clearly presented, and his prose is lively and engaging. I look forward to reading more from him.

More here.

Andrew Hussey in The Guardian:

It is just before nine on a Friday morning in Edinburgh and a thin, faint rain is falling outside the Scottish Poetry Library in Crichton’s Close, a short step from the tourist tat of the Royal Mile. This is where I meet French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq, who is squatting on the building’s concrete steps, hunched up in a large black anorak against the drizzle, sucking hard on the first of a long line of cigarettes.

With his pinched face and shambling gait, he is, to say the least, an incongruous figure; he looks more like a local wino than a world-famous man of letters. But Houellebecq, 47, is the nearest thing to a literary superstar France has produced in recent years. His books have been translated into 36 languages and recent film deals have made him a multi-millionaire. He is in Edinburgh to attend a conference which is being held in his honour by the University of St Andrews to coincide with the publication of his new novel, and which has attracted distinguished scholars and critics from all over the Western world.

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in The New Criterion:

According to Hazlitt, if we wish to know the force of human genius, we have only to read Shakespeare, but if we wish to know the futility of human learning, we have only to read his commentators.

Something similar might almost be said —almost, but not quite—of Sherlock Holmes and his commentators. The gulf is not nearly as great as that between Shakespeare and his critics, of course, but if literary genius is required in order to create a mythological world that is more real and alluring to readers than any reality itself, that once read is never forgotten, that for a century has inspired the devotion of the literary and the unliterary unlike, and that is vastly and innocently entertaining without being wholly devoid of instruction, then Conan Doyle had such genius to a very considerable degree.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

“We are losing,” warn Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon on the opening page of The Next Attack . In this chilling new book, they argue that the United States has, in the years since 9/11, frittered away more time than it took to win World War II: The Bush administration has plunged into a war of choice in Iraq that played into Osama bin Laden’s hands and produced “an extraordinary amount of wheel-spinning” instead of shoring up America’s domestic defenses. Meanwhile, the public’s attention has wandered, and the jihadist movement has weathered the loss of its Afghan haven and recast itself into new, more supple forms. “Even in his most feverish reveries,” the authors write, bin Laden could not “have imagined that America would stumble so badly.”This book’s Iraq chapters come as a glum reminder that, all too often, the debate over whether to invade Iraq was hermetically sealed off from the wider question of how best to destroy al Qaeda — as an organization, a network, a brand and an ideology. Even the administration’s critics (and human-rights-minded liberal hawks like George Packer) rarely talked about a potential war’s opportunity cost — about the range of urgent, attainable counterterrorism tasks that would be left undone because Washington had chosen to make the Iraq gamble its top post-9/11 priority.

And there is plenty to do.

More here.

From The New York Times:

This is a large part of the story Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tells in “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” Karabel’s tale begins in 1900, when young men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt graduated from academies like Groton, St. Paul’s and Choate, moved easily and almost automatically to Cambridge, New Haven or Princeton and set the cultural tone at the country’s prestigious universities. When they arrived on campus, these scions of the Protestant Establishment didn’t concern themselves overly much with academics. Their main proving grounds were extracurricular activities and social life. Positioning themselves to edit the school paper or join the right secret society, they strove to establish their social worth and to prove how much they embodied the virtues of the Harvard Man, the Yale Man or the Princeton Man. That meant being effortlessly athletic, charismatic, fair, brave, modest and, above all, a leader of men.

In those days, most people who applied to schools like Harvard were admitted because people who weren’t from the right social class didn’t bother applying. But Jews, for reasons that are not clear, never got the message. They applied to Harvard, Yale and Princeton even though they weren’t really wanted. And because many were so academically qualified, they increasingly got in.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

The only real power we the people possess, as individuals and en masse, is our deafening power to resolutely say No to the bullsheet. All those prescient and very pregnant Afrikans who tossed themselves overboard during the Middle Passage figured this out while sailing across the Atlantic in boats only built for Cuban links, as did the self-liberated captives aboard the Amistad who made the epiphanal discovery that sharp steel can tear open throats of any color. Midway through the last century Rosa Parks reminded us about the power of No all over again in far less dramatic, bloodthirsty, and self-annihilating fashion coming home one night on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. Defying a post-bellum social custom that decades of bowing down had transformed from a rule of law into a robotic law of the father, Ms. Parks said No loud enough for the Supreme Court to hear. She held her ground when convention commanded she clear out so some self-inflated kracka could assert his nobility among the animals. The history of African Americans is full of small, quiet acts of resistance as personal and fundamental as Ms. Parks’s, but few so resonant as to become a liberation movement’s creation myth.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Team of Rivals” (an apt but uninspiring title) opens in May 1860 with four men awaiting news from the national convention of the Republican Party in Chicago. Thousands of supporters were gathered in Auburn, N.Y., where a cannon was primed to fire a salute to the expected nomination of Senator William Henry Seward for president. In Columbus, Ohio, Gov. Salmon P. Chase hoped that if Seward faltered, the mantle would fall on his shoulders. In St. Louis, 66-year-old Edward Bates, a judge who still called himself a Whig, hoped the convention might turn to him as the only candidate who could carry the conservative free states, whose electoral votes were necessary for a Republican victory. In Springfield, Ill., a former one-term congressman who had been twice defeated for election to the Senate waited with resigned expectation that his long-shot candidacy would be flattened by the Seward steamroller.

Having set the stage for the nominating convention, Goodwin recounts the drama of Lincoln’s surprising first-ballot strength (102 votes to Seward’s 173½, Chase’s 49, and Bates’s 48). On the second ballot Lincoln pulled almost even with Seward, and amid rising excitement in a convention hall packed with a leather-lunged home-state cheering section, he won a stunning victory on the third ballot. All three of his shocked rivals believed the better man had lost. Lincoln’s subsequent election as president did not change their minds.

The Republican victory without a single electoral vote (and scarcely any popular votes) from the 15 slave states provoked seven of them to secede and form the Confederate States of America. In this crisis, Lincoln took the unparalleled step of appointing to his cabinet all three of his rivals plus a fourth, Simon Cameron, Pennsylvania’s favorite son. Seward got the top spot as secretary of state; Chase became secretary of the Treasury, Bates attorney general and Cameron secretary of war. Could this “team of rivals,” each of them initially convinced of his superiority to the inexperienced president, work together in harmony? Joseph Medill, the editor of The Chicago Tribune and one of Lincoln’s most loyal supporters, later asked the president why he had made these appointments. “We needed the strongest men of the party in the cabinet,” Lincoln replied. “These were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” They were indeed strong men, Goodwin notes. “But in the end, it was the prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all.”

More here.

Robert Skidelsky in the New York Review of Books:

The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, together with the concurrent collapse of the high-tech bubble, exposed America’s fragility, but this was masked by the hyperactivity of the Bush administration. The “war on terror” planted American armies in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Clinton surpluses were succeeded by the Bush deficits to shore up the economy and finance the military operations. However, as the Iraq escapade foundered and the deficits ballooned, the sense of relative decline reasserted itself. Unlike in 1987, there was now a clear candidate for the succession: China. This was especially so as the US economy became dependent on China’s bankrolling its huge trade deficit. The dream of an “American century” receded, to be replaced by the nightmare of a “Chinese century.”

Focus on China is overdue.

More here.

Mark Dowie in Orion Magazine:

In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft declaration states: “Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option to return.” During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and biggest enemy was “conservation.”

Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed a declaration stating that the “activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands.” These rhetorical jabs have shaken the international conservation community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.

More here.

Steven Weinberg in Physics Today:

Albert Einstein was certainly the greatest physicist of the 20th century, and one of the greatest scientists of all time. It may seem presumptuous to talk of mistakes made by such a towering figure, especially in the centenary of his annus mirabilis. But the mistakes made by leading scientists often provide a better insight into the spirit and presuppositions of their times than do their successes.¹ Also, for those of us who have made our share of scientific errors, it is mildly consoling to note that even Einstein made mistakes. Perhaps most important, by showing that we are aware of mistakes made by even the greatest scientists, we set a good example to those who follow other supposed paths to truth. We recognize that our most important scientific forerunners were not prophets whose writings must be studied as infallible guides—they were simply great men and women who prepared the ground for the better understandings we have now achieved.

The cosmological constant

In thinking of Einstein’s mistakes, one immediately recalls what Einstein (in a conversation with George Gamow²) called the biggest blunder he had made in his life: the introduction of the cosmological constant.

More here.

Wang Shuhai in the China Daily:

A friend of mine once told me a joke: A job hunter, a philosophy major, went here, there and everywhere in his search for employment, but in vain. Having run out of options, he swallowed his pride and took up the offer of playing a bear in a costume at a zoo. He was locked up in a cage, where he was supposed to imitate various bear-like movements to entertain visitors.

To his horror, another bear appeared in the cage and started approaching him. He panicked and was on the brink of collapse when the bear said: “Don’t be afraid. I’m also a philosophy major.”

Funny and somewhat ridiculous, the joke does reveal an essential truth. In a society geared towards immediate gains, philosophy seems unable to produce tangible benefits. For the majority, philosophy seems virtually useless.

More here.

J. M. Tyree in The Revealer:

If there is a controversy over Intelligent Design, as the President believes, then the scientists have already lost.

Yet aside from its nonentity status as a scientific theory — a “theory” must be provable or disprovable (“falsifiable”) by experiment, therefore Intelligent Design doesn’t qualify — there is another curious flaw in the design of Intelligent Design (ID) that has gone little noticed. ID isn’t just bad science, it’s a funny sort of religion. If somebody told you that Intelligent Design Theory could have anti-Christian implications, you might get exasperated, and understandably so, given the political leanings of the theory’s proponents. But, in fact, the harder you look at Intelligent Design, the less genuinely Christian it feels.

More here.

The riots in France have spread beyond Paris to Marseille, Dijon, and Normandy. For those who haven’t been following the story, here’s a timeline from The Tocqueville Connection.

Wednesday, October 19:

– Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy declares a “war without mercy” on violence in the suburbs.

Tuesday, October 25:

– During a visit to the suburb of Argenteuil, Sarkozy is pelted with stones and bottles. He describes rebellious youths in such districts as “rabble”.

Thursday, October 27:

– Two boys in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, Bouna Traore, a 15-year-old of Malian background, and Zyed Benna, a 17-year-old of Tunisian origin, flee a police identity check. They scale the wall of an electrical relay station and are electrocuted as they try to hide near a transformer.

– Youths in the suburb, hearing of the deaths, go on a rampage, burning 23 vehicles and vandalising buildings and hurling stones and bottles at riot police.

Friday, October 28:

– Four hundred youths clash with police in Clichy-sous-Bois, throwing stones, bottles and Molotov cocktails. Twenty-three officers are hurt and their colleagues are forced to fire rubber bullets to push back mobs. A shot is fired at a riot police van without causing injury. Thirteen people are arrested and 29 vehicles are burned.

From The Guardian:

When children’s novelist Adèle Geras found that she and Margaret Atwood had both chosen the same subject – Odysseus’ wife, Penelope – for their latest books, she looked forward to the chance to talk to her about it.

“This is, as I absolutely knew it would be way back in March, a real virtuoso piece. A corker. Fantastic. Intelligent. Every bit as good as promised. I love it and will treasure the very beautiful volume that was sent to me.

I was particularly interested to see where Atwood’s emphases and my own differed and converged. We both, for instance, broken up a prose narrative with poetry. The idea of turning The Odyssey around so that Penelope’s story is foregrounded occurred to us both. In Atwood’s book, Penelope speaks from the land of the dead in a voice that is laconic, humorous and clever. It’s my feeling that this may be how the author herself speaks, but I’ve no way of knowing. Penelope’s weaving is important in both our novels, but I’ve turned Odysseus’ adventures into pictures appearing on his wife’s loom – a notion that originates in Penelope Shuttle’s (yes, really) poem, Penelope. Argos the dog plays a part in my story but not in Atwood’s”.

More here.

From despardes.com:

At a star studded ceremony fit for royalty , Pakistan’s premier women rights activist Mukhtar Mai received Glamour’s women of the year award at New York’s Lincoln Center Wednesday night. “This award is a victory for poor women; it’s a victory for all women,” Mai announced at the ceremony after Hollywood star Brook Shields presented her an award of $20,000. She told some 2, 000 people present in the auditorium, her motto is: “End oppression with education.” The eleven other recipients of Glamour Award included Catherine Zeta-Jones, Goldie Hawn, Venus Williams, Christina Amanpour, Melisa Etheridge and the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson who received life-time achievement award.

But she stole the limelight, independent observers present at the ceremony told DesPardes.com. Ms Mai received two standing ovations from the Hollywood’s who’s who and New York’s glitterati when she said since the day she had raised her voice against male oppression, not a single woman had been raped in her area, nor had any village council passed the kind of orders that had been passed against her.

She told the audience that women who feared abuse at the hands of men had learnt to warn them off by saying that if they did not desist, “we will go and report this to Mukhtaran Mai”.

More here.

From eMediaWire:

Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline.

Knight, a rocket engine inventor, registered patent agent, and graduate of MIT and Georgetown Law, will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against anyone whose activities may fall within the scope of his published claims, including all major motion picture manufacturers and distributors, book publishers and distributors, television studios and broadcasters, and movie theaters. According to the official Patent Office website, provisional rights “provide a patentee with the opportunity to obtain a reasonable royalty from a third party that infringes a published application claim provided actual notice is given to the third party by [the] applicant, and a patent issues from the application with a substantially identical claim.”

More here. (And – I’m stepping out a bit here – the site of the insipid bastards trying to make money off of patenting plots.)

From The Economist:

Frederic Bastiat, who was that rarest of creatures, a French free-market economist, wrote to this newspaper in 1846 to express a noble and romantic hope: “May all the nations soon throw down the barriers which separate them.” Those words were echoed 125 years later by the call of John Lennon, who was not an economist but a rather successful global capitalist, to “imagine there’s no countries”. As he said in his 1971 song, it isn’t hard to do. But despite the spectacular rise in living standards that has occurred as barriers between nations have fallen, and despite the resulting escape from poverty by hundreds of millions of people in those places that have joined the world economy, it is still hard to convince publics and politicians of the merits of openness. Now, once again, a queue is forming to denounce openness—ie, globalisation. It is putting at risk the next big advance in trade liberalisation and the next big reduction in poverty in the developing countries.

In Washington, DC, home of a fabled “consensus” about poor countries’ economic policies, a bill before Congress devised by one of New York’s senators, Charles Schumer, threatens a 27.5% tariff on imports from China if that country does not revalue its currency by an equivalent amount. In Mr Schumer’s view, presumably, far too many Chinese peasants are escaping poverty. On November 4th George Bush will escape the febrile atmosphere along Pennsylvania Avenue by visiting Argentina to attend the 34-country Summit of the Americas. There he will be greeted by a rally against “imperialism”, by which is meant him personally, the Iraq war and the Free Trade Area of the Americas which he espouses. Among the hoped-for 50,000 demonstrators will be Diego Maradona, who as a footballer became rich through the game’s global market and as a cocaine-addict was dependent on barrier-busting international trade; and naturally his fellow-summiteer, Hugo Chávez, who is using trade in high-priced oil to finance his “21st-century socialism” in Venezuela.

More here.

Via Normblog, Joshua Cohen (of the University of London, not of MIT) reviews Slavoj Žižek’s Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, in Democratiya.

Žižek seeks consciously to distinguish the tone and logic of his broadside against the Iraq war from those of his counterparts in the mainstream anti-war movement. In one of his more telling footnotes, he confesses to a ‘fundamental sympathy’ with Christopher Hitchens, despite their very different stances on Iraq and the war on terror: ‘I infinitely prefer him to standard liberal-leftist anti-American ‘pacifism’. Hitchens is an adversary worth reading – in contrast to many critics of the war on Iraq, who are much better ignored’ (p.182).

It may be helpful to consider this passing doff of the hat towards Hitchens in the light of Žižek’s previous comments on the cardinal virtue of Leninism in his 2001 book On Belief: ‘a Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power and to exert it’ (p.4). Žižek’s withering contempt for the anti-war movement is directed against the contrived and (as Lenin would have it) infantile ‘purity’ of its politics, the stance of Hegel’s ‘Beautiful Soul’. Thus, where Hitchens recognises that any authentic political judgment will bloody one’s hands, the anti-war movement is enslaved to the fantasy of its own political innocence. Such a fantasy harbours more than a little unacknowledged violence of its own.

This insistence on Leninist responsibility (again, I can’t help inserting a note of parenthetic petit-bourgeois anxiety here – is Leninism really the most apt name for this responsibly self-implicating politics?) helps make sense of one of the apparent contradictions in Žižek’s political writings, namely that he seems simultaneously more uncompromisingly radical and more pragmatic than the liberal-left he prefers to ignore.

Paula Voell in the Buffalo News:

Looking for the Center for Inquiry’s international congress? Just follow the cars with the “I Doubt It” decals.

That’s the mantra for the 600 to 800 attendees expected to converge in Buffalo from around the world this week. These are the people who scrutinize and critique what others believe without questioning.

They’ll be here for a congress called “Toward a New Enlightenment,” meant to respond to assaults on science, reason, free inquiry, secularism and humanist values.

“We are committed to science and reason to resolve human problems,” said Paul Kurtz, Center founder. “We are naturalists and recognize that the human species is part of nature. We also recognize the need for raising the level of values and criticizing the banalities of modern culture…

It’s no wonder that Kurtz might feel that he needs all the help available between the building expansion and the congress that includes keynote addresses by Richard Dawkins, zoologist and author of “The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution” and Ann Druyan, co-writer with her husband, the late Carl Sagan, of the award-winning series “Cosmos”…

In the last few decades, Kurtz has gone from being a University at Buffalo professor to being one of the world’s best known skeptics, embracing the role and encouraging everyone to look closely when a Bigfoot claim surfaces or someone says they see an image of the Virgin Mary in some peeling paint. In the last two years, Kurtz and company have taken on alternative medicine and claims for mental health therapies.

More here.

From the Harvard Gazette:

Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker was among Kass’ harshest critics, saying he disagreed with “every single sentence” of Kass’ chapter on cloning. Pinker said he believed that if reproductive cloning could be done without risk to the child the government shouldn’t ban it, comparing it with the birth of identical twins, though at different times.

Pinker took particular issue with Kass’ assertion that a feeling of “repugnance” for certain scientific practices ought to be heeded, saying that repugnance has been used to justify misdeeds against Jews and as an excuse to ban many things now commonly deemed acceptable.

“Time after time, the argument of repugnance has argued against things that are now morally acceptable,” Pinker said.

More here.