Via Normblog, Amartya Sen on democracy and cultural determinism, in the WSJ.com’s Opinion Journal.

The belief in the allegedly “Western” nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms. …[T]there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).

Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance… [T]he history of Muslims includes a variety of traditions, not all of which are just religious or “Islamic” in any obvious sense. The work of Arab and Iranian mathematicians, from the eighth century onward reflects a largely nonreligious tradition. Depending on politics, which varied between one Muslim ruler and another, there is also quite a history of tolerance and of public discussion, on which the pursuit of a modern democracy can draw. For example, the emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides, as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all, along with championing regular discussions between followers of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other beliefs (including atheism).

Cultural dynamics does not have to build something from absolutely nothing, nor need the future be rigidly tied to majoritarian beliefs today or the power of the contemporary orthodoxy. To see Iranian dissidents who want a fully democratic Iran not as Iranian advocates but as “ambassadors of Western values” would be to add insult to injury, aside from neglecting parts of Iranian history (including the practice of democracy in Susa or Shushan in southwest Iran 2,000 years ago). The diversity of the human past and the freedoms of the contemporary world give us much more choice than cultural determinists acknowledge.

From CNN:

Bidders in an Internet auction are offering more than 13,000 euros ($15,600) for a wartime German encoding machine, similar to ones whose messages were cracked by British code breakers in World War II.

The portable Enigma encryption machine made in 1941 has a keyboard and a series of rotors designed to scramble messages. It is up for sale on Internet auction site, eBay.

More here.

Tony O’Brien in Metapsychology:

Why are so many creative people apparently crazy? Is mental illness, for some people, a doorway to creativity, something that unlocks latent genius that would otherwise lie dormant? Jeffrey A Kottler attempts to answer this question in Divine Madness, Ten Stories of Creative Struggle. The book presents ten case studies of well-known artists, using the term in a broad sense. They are all people who have pushed their creative talents to the limits. In most cases they finally lost the struggle, and died at their own hand or as a consequence of drug abuse. Their lives pose questions about creativity, about suffering, and about art. Finding answers is very much harder.

The individuals Kottler chooses to study are a mixed group of writers, visual artists, and performing artists. Their names are familiar: Plath, Woolf, Munroe, Garland, Nikinsky, Hemingway and others, a roll call of the famously mad.

More here.

Tyler Green in the New York Observer:

As an Iranian-American artist who was effectively exiled from her homeland, Shirin Neshat was happy to be included in an exhibition of artists from the Islamic world.  But when the opportunity came—Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking opened at the Museum of Modern Art on Feb. 26—Ms. Neshat was upset.

Without Boundary is the most important exhibit MoMA has launched in at least a decade, and it’s the first exhibition of contemporary art from the Islamic world in a major American museum since 9/11. The show features 14 artists from Islamic countries, an Indian born to Muslim parents, and two Americans (Mike Kelley and Bill Viola were added late in the show’s development). Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey and Pakistan are represented in the exhibition, though nearly all of the artists from those countries now primarily work in the West. The exhibition is a reminder of the difficulties that museums face when it comes to merging—or not—art and politics.

“My immediate reaction was, how could anyone today discuss art made by contemporary Muslim artists and not speak about the role the subjects of religion and contemporary politics play in the artists’ minds?” Ms. Neshat said. “For some of us, our art is interconnected to the development of our personal lives, which have been controlled and defined by politics and governments. Some artists, including Marjane Satrapi and myself, are ‘exiled’ from our country because of the problematic and controversial nature of our work.”

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

In the summer of 1963, Mollie Orshansky, a forty-eight-year-old statistician at the Social Security Administration, in Washington, D.C., published an article in the Social Security Bulletin entitled “Children of the Poor.” “The wonders of science and technology applied to a generous endowment of natural resources have wrought a way of life our grandfathers never knew,” she wrote. “Creature comforts once the hallmark of luxury have descended to the realm of the commonplace, and the marvels of modern industry find their way into the home of the American worker as well as that of his boss. Yet there is an underlying disquietude reflected in our current social literature, an uncomfortable realization that an expanding economy has not brought gains to all in equal measure. It is reflected in the preoccupation with counting the poor—do they number 30 million, 40 million, or 50 million?”

Orshansky’s timing was propitious. In December of 1962, President John F. Kennedy had asked Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to gather statistics on poverty. In early 1963, Heller gave the President a copy of a review by Dwight Macdonald, in The New Yorker, of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America: Poverty in the United States,” in which Harrington claimed that as many as fifty million Americans were living in penury.

The federal government had never attempted to count the poor, and Orshansky’s paper proposed an ingenious and straightforward way of doing so.

More here.

Sparked by Dahlia Lithwick’s piece on the death penalty, Lindsay Beyerstein considers “closure”.

I am deeply suspicious of the concept of closure. The general public and policy-makers take it as an article of faith that there is something called closure that the criminal justice system can help provide. Even Dalia Lithwick takes it more or less for granted that closure is real. She just questions whether executions are the best way to help survivors achieve it.

Intuitively, we all know more or less what closure is supposed to be. At first grief is overwhelming and all-consuming, but eventually it fades enough for the bereaved person to get on with life. Closure has something to do with that transition.

Upon closer examination, the concept of closure turns out to be much more elusive that we might have supposed.

Closure might refer the emotional shift from acute grief to emotional healing. Alternatively, might to describe some psychological or practical prerequisites that must be in place in order for a person to transcend acute grief (e.g., time, insight, restitution…).

From Scientific American:

Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Yet the strength of people’s conviction is often in inverse proportion to the amount of robust factual evidence they have.

As is common in contentious public debates, different people mean different things by the same word. Some interpret “globalization” to mean the global reach of communications technology and capital movements, some think of the outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries, and others see globalization as a byword for corporate capitalism or American cultural and economic hegemony. So it is best to be clear at the outset of this article that I shall primarily refer to economic globalization–the expansion of foreign trade and investment. How does this process affect the wages, incomes and access to resources for the poorest people in the world?

More here.

From Nature:

Claims that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence tend to attract angry responses, in part because of studies that have attempted to link group differences in IQ with race. In their 1994 book The Bell Curve, political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein argued that the lower-income status of some US ethnic minorities was linked to below-average IQ scores among those groups. These were in turn attributed to mainly genetic factors. Researchers say that a remarkable data set on the developing brain adds to the idea that IQ is a meaningful concept in neuroscience. The study, which is published in this issue, suggests that performance in IQ tests is associated with changes in the brain during adolescence.

More here.

Constance Casey in Slate:

Like a lot of beautiful things, tulips inspire malfeasance, and they take a lot of work to maintain. Careless people pick them. Mice, rats, voles, skunks, squirrels, and deer eat them. Even in Holland, they need a lot of human intervention to thrive, because they’d rather be on a rocky mountainside in Turkey, where they come from. 

My favorite tulip story comes from The Year of Reading Proust, a memoir by Wesleyan University professor Phyllis Rose. A few years ago, Rose looked out the window of her on-campus house and saw an undergraduate picking a bouquet of tulips from her yard and carrying the flowers uphill toward the dorms. By the time she tracked the tulip thief down, she’d attracted a small crowd.

More here.

3QD’s own Ker Than, in LiveScience.com:

The ancient asteroid that slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and purportedly ended the reign of the dinosaurs occurred 300,000 years too early, according to a controversial new analysis of melted rock ejected from the impact site.

The standard theory states that a giant asteroid about 6 miles wide smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula close to the current Mexican town of Chicxulub about 65 million years ago. The impact raised enough dust and debris to blot out the sun for decades or even centuries.

Such a large impact would also have triggered a host of natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and global firestorms that fried, starved and suffocated the beasts.

But Markus Harting of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and a small group of scientists thinks the Chicxulub impact happened too early to have been the infamous dinosaur-killer.

More here.

Daniel Edwards’ sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth has sparked controversy in all corners, in the BBC.

A nude sculpture depicting singer Britney Spears giving birth to her son has prompted a flood of emails from both pro-choice and anti-abortionists.

Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston will be unveiled at New York’s Capla Kesting Art gallery in April.

Gallery co-owner David Kesting said they had received 3,000 emails, some from “pro-life” supporters who thought it was degrading to their movement.

He added that other people were “upset” the sculpture was a pro-life monument.

The life-size work, by artist Daniel Edwards, features Spears crouched on all fours on a bear-skin rug as she gives birth.

It will be displayed at the gallery alongside a display case filled with anti-abortion materials.

Also see this (essay with photos) and this.

Do bloggers lean left or right? Does the blogosphere have an ideological tilt? Such questions once engaged mainstream reporters and pundits struggling to understand an upstart online movement. During the post-9/11, pre-Iraq explosion of “warbloggers,” we were told that blogs gave voice to red-state anger and conservative values. Then, during the heyday of Howard Dean’s outsider campaign, we heard that they instead embodied a new progressive populism.

Now, the pointlessness of these questions seems plain. You might as well ask, “Do writers lean left or right?” — or, “Does the world have an ideological tilt?”

more from Salon here.

If you’re like me, the peculiar selectivity of the ’80s revival has been a source of considerable perplexity and annoyance. Overlooking complex cultural touchstones like Crime Story, Kate Bush, Q: The Winged Serpent and Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy in favor of Rubik’s Cube, Reaganomics and The Breakfast Club, the ordained collective memory shrouds the awkward vital perversity of the era in Day-Glo bangles and Cosby sweaters.

Similarly, the official picture of the ’80s art world is flat and cartoonish, an embarrassing bubble of self-indulgence irrevocably linked to junk bonds, cocaine and the gutting of the National Endowment for the Arts. But just as Aerial and the Futureheads have re-ignited Kate Bush’s hipness quotient and PKD is suddenly everybody’s go-to guy for the looming information apocalypse, visual artists of the ’80s — unfairly lumped in (and dismissed) with the ham-fisted neo-expressionists, anal-retentive postmodernists and not-anal-retentive-enough performance artists that populate the awesomely bad ’80s of the imagination — are being rediscovered in all their subtlety and depth.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From National Geographic:

Pampering pets with designer goods isn’t so unusual—and now even your houseflies can get outfitted in style.

An entry in a German science-photo competition, this image shows a fly sporting a set of “designer” lenses crafted and set in place with a cutting-edge laser technique. The glasses fit snuggly on the fly’s 0.08-inch-wide (2-millimeter-wide) head.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Even though we humans write the textbooks and may justifiably be suspected of bias, few doubt that we are the smartest creatures on the planet. Many animals have special cognitive abilities that allow them to excel in their particular habitats, but they do not often solve novel problems. Some of course do, and we call them intelligent, but none are as quick-witted as we are.

What favored the evolution of such distinctive brainpower in humans or, more precisely, in our hominid ancestors? One approach to answering this question is to examine the factors that might have shaped other creatures that show high intelligence and to see whether the same forces might have operated in our forebears. Several birds and nonhuman mammals, for instance, are much better problem solvers than others: elephants, dolphins, parrots, crows. But research into our close relatives, the great apes, is surely likely to be illuminating.

More here.

Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books:

On the morning of May 30, 1593, twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Marlowe made his way to an appointment he had in Deptford, a small town on the Thames, a few miles downriver from London Bridge. The appointment was for 10 AM at a house that belonged to a widow named Eleanor Bull. There Marlowe met three men with whom he was already well acquainted, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley. The four sat all morning in quiet conversation, had lunch together, and afterward walked for some time in widow Bull’s garden. At about 6 PM they returned inside for supper. Along with the table at which they ate, the room contained a bed, on which Marlowe lay down after dining; the other three continued to sit next to each other on a single bench, their backs to their reclining companion.

According to the official account, an argument began between Ingram Frizer and Marlowe about the bill— the “reckoning,” as it was termed—for the meals they had eaten that day. Their words grew ever more heated. Suddenly Marlowe’s anger must have boiled over, for he jumped up and grabbed Frizer’s dagger from its sheath. Hemmed in by Skeres and Poley and at first unable to move, Frizer was slashed twice on the head before he finally wrested his weapon out of Marlowe’s hands. “And so it befell, in that affray, that the said Ingram, in defense of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher then and there a mortal wound over his right eye, of the depth of two inches and of the width of one inch.”

More here.

From The New Yorker:

[Dennett’s] real contribution is an accessible account of what might be called the natural history of religion. (Religion, as he provisionally defines it, involves believing in, and seeking the approval of, a supernatural being.) “There was a time,” he writes, “when there was no religion on this planet, and now there is lots of it. Why?” Why did religion appear in the first place? And why did certain religions spread while others sank into obscurity?

To answer these questions, Dennett says, we must confront two spells. The first is the taboo against asking uncomfortable questions about religion. In his view, religion is simply too important to be spared hard questions. Indeed, he argues, religion is among the most powerful forces on earth and, as religiously inspired warfare and acts of terrorism remind us, it is not always benign. The second spell, in Dennett’s account, is one cast by religion itself. Do we risk dimming religion’s numinous glow by the very act of scientific analysis? Will we, out of what Dennett calls a “pathological excess of curiosity,” rob believers of the deepest and most important part of their lives? Dennett is sensitive to this concern and concedes the danger, but he concludes that the chances of undermining religious sensibility are slight…

More here.

Helen Nugent in the London Times:

Britain and France have experienced long periods of conflict and rivalry but now victory in one area can be claimed: Britons are more intelligent than the French.

A new European league of IQ scores has ranked the British in eighth place, well above the French, who were 19th. According to Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, Britons have an average IQ of 100. The French scored 94. But it is not all good news. Top of the table were the Germans, with an IQ of 107. The British were also beaten by the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.

Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc.

More here.

Chris Baker in Slate:

Thousands of industry professionals have descended on Silicon Valley to ogle the latest physics engines and graphics cards, hear panel discussions like “C++ on Next-Gen Consoles: Effective Code for New Architectures,” and thrill at being in the same room with the guy who made Marble Madness. But the highlight of the annual Game Developers Conference is an epic battle known as the Game Design Challenge.

The challenge is the brainchild of Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of gameLab and the author of several scholarly books on video games. Each year, Zimmerman asks three pre-eminent designers to build a game around some ridiculously ambitious theme. This year, he tasked them with dreaming up something that could win the Nobel Peace Prize.

More here.

From Space.com:

Tourists and scientists are gathering at spots around the world for a total solar eclipse Wednesday that will sweep northeast from Brazil to Mongolia, blotting out the Sun across swathes of of the world’s poorest lands.

Day will turn briefly to dark twilight in the eclipse’s path as the Moon comes between the Earth and the Sun. [Viewer’s Guide]

As is often the case, the eclipse is shrouded in mystery and misinformation.

The event will occur in highly populated areas, including west Africa, where governments scrambled to educate people about the dangers of looking at the eclipse without proper eye protection.

A total solar eclipse is safe to watch during the darkness of totality. But when Sun is not fully blocked by the Moon, its light can easily damage the eyes, so special protection is required.

More here.  [NASA TV will carry the eclipse live from 5 a.m. to 6:12 a.m. ET on March 29.]