“Spanish to English? French to Russian? Computers haven’t been up to the task. But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code.”

Evan Ratliff in Wired:

Jaime Carbonell, chief science officer of Meaningful Machines, hunches over his laptop in the company’s midtown Manhattan offices, waiting for it to decode a message from the perpetrators of a grisly terrorist attack. Running software that took four years and millions of dollars to develop, Carbonell’s machine – or rather, the server farm it’s connected to a few miles away – is attempting a task that has bedeviled computer scien­tists for half a century. The message isn’t encrypted or scrambled or hidden among thousands of documents. It’s simply written in Spanish: “Declaramos nuestra responsabilidad de lo que ha ocurrido en Madrid, justo dos años y medio después de los atentados de Nueva York y Washington.”

I brought along the text, taken from a Spanish newspaper transcript of a 2004 al Qaeda video claiming responsibility for the Madrid train bombings, to test Meaningful Machines’ automated translation software. The brainchild of a quirky former used-car salesman named Eli Abir, the company has been designing the system in secret since just after 9/11. Now the application is ready for public scrutiny, on the heels of a research paper that Carbonell – who is also a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the school’s Language Technologies Institute – presented at a conference this summer. In it, he asserts that the company’s software represents not only the most accurate Spanish-to-English translation system ever created but also a major advance in the field of machine translation.

More here.

Diane McWhorter in Slate:

For some reason, I keep thinking about an observation Eleanor Roosevelt made in an unpublished interview conducted in May of 1940, as the German Wehrmacht swept across France. She expressed dismay that a “great many Americans” would look with favor on a Hitler victory in Europe and be greatly attracted to fascism. Why? “Simply because we are a people who tend to admire things that work,” she said. So, were the voters last month protesting Bush’s policies—or were they complaining that he had not made those policies work? If Operation Iraqi Freedom had not been such an unqualified catastrophe, how long would the public have assented to the programs that accompanied the “war on terror”: the legalization of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the unauthorized surveillance of law-abiding Americans, the unilateral exercise of executive power, and the Bush team’s avowed prerogative to “create our own reality”?

More here.

From Time:

Why aren’t women in the U.S. better at saving and managing their money? I’ve heard all the excuses: “I don’t have time … I’m too disorganized … I don’t do numbers … My husband does that.” As I discuss at length in my new book, Make Money, Not Excuses (Crown Business), I’m convinced that the real reason is a thought process that goes something like this: “I don’t have anything to wear! I’m going to buy that dress, that skirt, that bag, those shoes!”

Research suggests that 2% to 5% of the U.S. population–women and men equally, according to a recent study–are compulsive buyers. These people are special cases; they have a psychological disorder and need treatment. But a significant percentage of American women–12% to 15% by some estimates–are what Nancy Ridgway at the University of Richmond calls excessive buyers. They shop not out of need but out of a desire to make themselves feel better, to give themselves a pick-me-up.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Nick Seddon has agreed to learn 100 poems in a year. Which would you recommend?

When this summer I accepted the madcap challenge to learn 100 poems in a year, I certainly didn’t imagine it would be a life-changing experience. Indeed, having never attempted anything remotely like this before – I got all the way through school and university without learning a single poem – I’m not really sure what I expected at all.

OK, I’ll admit I rather liked the idea of taking poems into my mind as one might pluck apples from a tree, a sort of intellectual kleptomania. And because it was conceived of as a race, I guess there was also a tinge of macho competitiveness. And yes, I suppose it did cross my mind that reciting poetry would be a sly way to seduce the ladies.

But those shady motives feel rather redundant now. Six months ago a friend and I drew up a list of our favourite poems and having been going strong ever since. I am half way through, but I’m no longer doing this simply because I want to reach the end point. It’s been all about falling in love with poetry again, and discovering it as if for the first time. Right from the start I have found that memorizing revives things that have become stale or deadened.

More here.

From the website AskPhilosophers:

There is a paradox surrounding philosophy that AskPhilosophers seeks to address. On the one hand, everyone confronts philosophical issues throughout his or her life. But on the other, very few have the opportunity to learn about philosophy, a subject that is usually taught only at the college level. (Why? There is no good reason for this and plenty of bad ones.) AskPhilosophers aims to bridge this gap by putting the skills and knowledge of trained philosophers at the service of the general public.

If you have a question that you think is in some way philosophical or relates to philosophy, feel free to ask it here. If you are not sure whether your question is appropriate, send it in anyway.

Here’s an example question, and an excerpt from the response by Peter S. Fosl:

Is homosexuality ethical? If so, what differentiates it from incest? More specifically an infertile incestual relationship that has two consenting adults.

….what’s the moral difference between (a) an infertile (heterosexual, I take it) incestuous relationship that comprises two consenting adults and (b) a binary homosexual relationship? I suppose I would say that the crucial moral difference is that the infertile incestuous relationship involves close family members while the homosexual sexual relationship (assuming it’s not incestuous) does not. The moral weight here is born by the moral prohibitions built into the idea of family.

I’m not an anthropologist, but I’m told by them that every organization of family involves some sort of incest prohibition. Could there be families without incest prohibitions? I don’t know, but I have my doubts. Could there be homosexual families? The existence of many homosexual families makes it abundantly clear that there can be.

More here, categorized and alphabetized for your convenience.

Alexander Waugh in Literary Review:

These are the words I wrote down in my little blue book when I first read 50 Reasons to Hate the French in proof back in July of this year:

As a congenital Francophile, weaned from my cradle on the great cheeses of Normandy and the rich clarets of the Médoc; as someone for whom the glories of French culture, fashion and landscape have provided the keenest sensations of adolescence; as a grown man whose very fibre has, at times, fallen, prostrate, before the altars of all French people, places and things, I am greatly encouraged by the publication of this book. Eden and Clarke’s inspired new gospel (which I read on a flight to Damascus) has cleared my head of all those erring passions and revealed to me the true darkness lurking behind all that fake accordion music and garlic. So verily, verily say I now unto you, the French are a vicious, absurd and inadequate people and I very much hope that this super book of proofs to that effect will succeed in one day drubbing their whole abominable nation right off the face of our lovely planet.

For three months I have been without a copy as I sent mine to my brother who runs a Marmite and Stilton emporium in the magnificent chalk-white market town of Saintes on the banks of the river Charente. In the time it has taken him to respond I have finished off at least a case of Château Talbot 2002 (too young? I think not); I’ve eaten three goose necks stuffed with foie gras brought to me by a pilgrim from Castelnaudary, and God knows how many Crotin de Chavignol; I’ve collapsed in tears of laughter at a cinematic farce called Le Dîner de cons and have spent nearly every moment of my free time practising Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche on the piano. Needless to say, after all these infusions, my feelings for the French have reverted to their pristine state of amorousness, which is why (alarmed only by apparent gullibility) I seized on the opportunity offered by Literary Review to take a second look.

More here.

David Plotz in Slate:

Elijah issues his challenge—my God vs. yours, for all the marbles. “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” Elijah proposes an incineration contest. He’ll get one bull and the 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah will get another. Both will call on their gods, and whichever incinerates the animal is the true Lord.

The rival priests go first. They shout to Baal all morning long, to no effect. Elijah interrupts their fruitless prayers with perhaps the first insult-comic routine in history, a hilarious, sardonic attack on Baal and his silence. “At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, ‘Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.’ ” Reading this, you can imagine exactly what kind of man Elijah was—brilliant, blunt, and sarcastic. (Have you ever heard Barney Frank interviewed? That’s what Elijah sounds like.)

The Baal priests grow increasingly frantic, cutting themselves with swords and raving to their god. But, of course, Baal doesn’t answer. Then, Elijah takes center stage. A superb showman, he has the Israelites gather close around him, heightening the drama. Then he builds an altar with 12 stones—one for each tribe—and soaks the altar and the bull three times with water, so there will be no charge of spontaneous combustion. (For all you animal rights fans, I should note that the bull is already dead.) Elijah prays to the Lord, “Let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O Lord, answer me.” The Lord ignites the bull, the stones, and even the water. The Israelites fall on their faces and pray to Him. At Elijah’s urging, they seize the 850 false prophets and slaughter them.

More here.

It’s December, and I guess we’re off to an early start with the year-end lists. 3QD’s own best books of the year list isn’t posted until Christmas eve each year, so here’s the New York Times’ one:

ABSURDISTAN
By Gary Shteyngart. Random House, $24.95.
Shteyngart’s scruffy, exuberant second novel, equal parts Gogol and Borat, is immodest on every level – it’s long, crude, manic and has cheap vodka on its breath. It also happens to be smart, funny and, in the end, extraordinarily rich and moving. “Absurdistan” introduces Misha Vainberg, the rap-music-obsessed, grossly overweight son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia. After attending college in the United States, he is now stuck in St. Petersburg, scrambling for an American visa that may never arrive. Caught between worlds, and mired in his own prejudices and thwarted desires, Vainberg just may be an antihero for our times.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF AMY HEMPEL
Scribner, $27.50.
A quietly powerful presence in American fiction during the past two decades, Hempel has demonstrated unusual discipline in assembling her urbane, pointillistic and wickedly funny short stories. Since the publication of her first collection, “Reasons to Live,” in 1985, only three more slim volumes have appeared – a total of some 15,000 sentences, and nearly every one of them has a crisp, distinctive bite. These collected stories show the true scale of Hempel’s achievement. Her compact fictions, populated by smart, neurotic, somewhat damaged narrators, speak grandly to the longings and insecurities in all of us, and in a voice that is bracingly direct and sneakily profound.

More here.

3QD friend Edward B. Rackley in his blog, Across the Divide:

What other country can boast such diverse forms of crippling instability, all occuring simultaneously? If the Bemba fanatics in Kinshasa dont lynch you for speaking Swahili and supporting Kabila, Nkunda’s men around Goma will gladly terminate you on suspicion of ‘oppressing Tutsis’. And don’t go seeking refuge in the wilds around Goma, as you’re sure to get cooked by fresh lava flows from Mt. Nyamuragira, which erupted last night just outside of town.

Official election results were announced last night by Supreme Court officials in Kinshasa. They spoke under heavy armed guard from their temporary digs in the Ministry of the Interior, following last week’s incendiary ravaging of the Supreme Court building by rabid Bemba supporters. Never has the thirst for lawlessness been more accurately expressed. Dont care for rule of law? Just burn down the Supreme Court.

In any other country, tanks would have flooded the streets in retaliation, and martial law immediately declared. In Kinshasa, police forces stood agape for a few reflective moments before the ravenous crowd of assailants, and promptly fled. UN peacekeepers arrived after the fact. The national army did not respond.

More here.

Saleem H. Ali in Pakistan’s Daily Times:

Every year, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation provides a generous award of US$500,000 each “to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits”. The MacArthur fellows are free to use the funds as they please over five years without any ‘strings attached’. Some might pay off a mortgage, while others invest in a scholarship or finance a sabbatical. The recipients range in their expertise from neuroscience to carpentry, and are selected through a rather opaque but rigorous nomination and review process conducted by the foundation under utmost secrecy. Among the twenty-five recipients this year is an artist of Pakistani lineage, Shahzia Sikander, who was recognised for “merging the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles to create visually compelling, resonant works on multiple scales and in a dazzling array of media”.

Traditionally, visual art has been a culturally reductive form of human expression, whereby communities, tribes, cities and countries have defined their identity. We have been quick to label art as ‘eastern or western’, ‘indigenous or foreign’, ‘Christian or Islamic’, and so the list goes on as galleries define their areas of specialty. However, artists such as Shahzia Sikander are transcending such categorisations and resent being exoticised as simply Asian or Pakistani.

More here.

From Jewcy:

Earlier this year, Newsweek religion columnist Marc Gellman confessed that atheists had lately befuddled him: “What I simply do not understand is why they are often so angry,” Gellman lamented. “I just don’t get it.”

Why are atheists so angry? Sam Harris and Dennis Prager inaugurate Jewcy’s “Big Question” series by arguing this very question. In the Big Question, passionate thinkers will debate the weightiest, most contentious issues of the day via e-mail.

Author of the thundering anti-theist polemics The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris may just be the Thomas Paine of an emerging movement to wrench religion out of American life. Prager is a nationally syndicated talk radio host who trumpets the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

More here.  [Thanks to Beajerry of Cosmic Watercooler.]

From thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com:

Nothing keeps a relationship on its toes so much as lively debate. Fortunate, then, that my girlfriend and I agree on absolutely nothing. At all.

Combine utter, polar disagreement on everything, ever, with the fact that I am a text-book Only Child, and she is a violent psychopath, and we’re warming up. Then factor in my being English while she is German, which not only makes each one of us personally and absolutely responsible for the history, and the social and cultural mores of our respective countries, but also opens up a whole field of sub-arguments grounded in grammatical and semantic disputes and, well, just try saying anything and walking away.

Examples? Okey-dokey. We have argued about:

• The way one should cut a Kiwi Fruit in half (along its length or across the middle).
• Leaving the kitchen door open (three times a day that one, minimum).
• The best way to hang up washing.
• Those little toothpaste speckles you make when you brush your teeth in front of the mirror.
• I eat two-fingered Kit-Kats like I’d eat any other chocolate bars of that size, i.e., without feeling the need to snap them into two individual fingers first. Margret accused me of doing this, ‘deliberately to annoy her’.
• Which way – the distances were identical – to drive round a circular bypass (this resulted in her kicking me in the head from the back seat as I drove along).
• Which type of iron to buy (price wasn’t an issue, it was the principle, damnit).
• Margret enters the room. The television is showing Baywatch. Margret says, ‘Uh-huh, you’re watching Baywatch again.’ I say, ‘I’m not watching, it’s just on.’ Repeat. For the duration of the programme.
• She wants to paint the living room yellow. I have not the words.

More more here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Christopher Hayes in In These Times:

Allen Sanderson, 62, has been teaching the intro macro and micro courses at the university for the last 18 years and though he initially appears somewhat grave and understated, it is quickly apparent that he is a master of technique. His lectures skip along, propelled by a series of wry, contrarian quips, each punctuated with a visual rimshot: a slight pause and a thrust jaw. “When you hear, ‘The economics department at U. of C.,’ one’s free association is ‘pro-business, greedy bastards,’” says Sanderson (pause, jaw thrust) in the first lecture. “I tend to think that’s not the case. Greedy bastards we may be, but we’re not pro-business. Republicans tend to be very pro-business. It’s a genetic defect of Republicans. Democrats tend to be anti-business, another genetic defect. We are not anti-business; we are not pro-business. We are pro-choice in the ultimate sense of pro-market. Based on empirical work, macro and micro solutions are probably better worked out by private markets than government intervention.”

His second lecture begins with a thought experiment. Noting that there are only 26 spots left in the class for the 52 students who would still like to enroll, he asks, “How should we figure out who gets to go into the class?” The students—eager, studious and serious—shoot their hands up and offer a variety of ideas: Seniority? First-come, first-serve? Ask prospective students to write an essay? It takes about a minute for a confident young man to give the answer Sanderson’s looking for: “auction by price.”

More here.  [Thanks to David Giles.]

Paul Marks in New Scientist:

The promise is fantastic: new generations of remote-controlled aircraft could soon be flying in civilian airspace, performing all sorts of useful tasks. They could monitor flood defences, keep criminal suspects under surveillance, give firefighters a bird’s-eye view of blazes, search for people lost at sea, or provide wireless networks from on high.

The reality is that a lack of radio frequencies to control the planes and serious concerns over their safety are going to keep them grounded for years to come.

Surprisingly, given the commercial hopes it has for civil unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the aviation industry has failed to obtain the radio frequencies it needs to control them – and it will be 2011 before it can even begin to lobby for space on the radio spectrum. What’s more, none of the world’s aviation authorities will allow civil UAVs to fly in their airspace without a reliable system for avoiding other aircraft – and the industry has not yet even begun developing such a system. Experts say this could take up to seven years.

More here.

Ben Gose in the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

In Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (Basic Books), Arthur C. Brooks finds that religious conservatives are far more charitable than secular liberals, and that those who support the idea that government should redistribute income are among the least likely to dig into their own wallets to help others.

Some of his findings have been touched on elsewhere by other scholars, but Mr. Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University, breaks new ground in amassing information from 15 sets of data in a slim 184-page book (not including the appendix) that he proudly describes as “a polemic.”

“If liberals persist in their antipathy to religion,” Mr. Brooks writes, “the Democrats will become not only the party of secularism, but also the party of uncharity.”

More here.

Babara Mink at the Light in Winter Festival in Ithaca, NY:

Our 2007 festival features “connections” between us and the world we live in: music and art, engineering and sound, the smallest components of matter and the visible world, physics and movement, our actions and their effect on our planet, the brain and the senses, and animal whispers and film sound.

Long-time Ithaca resident Carl Sagan once said: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” During the Festival weekend, you will get to embrace the excitement of discovery and celebrate the connections between science and the arts. Join us for an entertaining and educational winter festival that will inspire your own curiosity and creativity.

Among the many and varied program events:

Warped Passages
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m., Statler Auditorium, Cornell University campus
Sponsored by Sprague and Janowsky, Accountants and the Cornell Department of Physics
Presenters Lisa Randall & Stephen Andrew Taylor take us on an incredible journey inside the world of quantum physics, where particles too small to imagine violate our expectations. Randall is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Harvard and an expert in string theory, a topic she explores in her book, Warped Passages. Taylor is a professor of composition at the University of Illinois who says, “I was inspired to compose Seven Microworlds by learning about string theory…In my piece, the electronics are intended to act as a bridge between the ‘real world’ of the flute and guitar and these hidden microworlds that permeate us all.” With Wendy Mehne and Pablo Cohen.

More information about the festival here.

From The New York Sun:

Legend has it that Freud, although educated in the philosophies of his day, studiously avoided the work of Nietzsche to preserve the originality of his ideas against external influence. Nietzsche’s analysis of the human psyche, how values were supposedly projections of people’s unspoken jealousies and fears, ran dangerously close to Freud’s idea (still a work in progress at the end of the 19th century) that the roots of conscious behavior lay in unconscious desires.

But after reading Dr. Peter Kramer’s outstanding new biography of Freud, one wonders if Freud feared something else, not influence but self-knowledge, for Dr. Kramer’s Freud is practically the living embodiment of Nietzsche’s will to power. It’s not simply that Freud was incredibly ambitious. (At age four, after soiling a chair, he reassured his mother that he would grow up to be a great man and buy her another.) Rather, it was Freud’s determination to systematize the world, to bring order to chaos, and to impose his theory of life on life itself — a determination so intense that one of Freud’s colleagues called it a “psychical need.”

More here.

From Lens Culture:

Simon Norfolk is a very talented driven young photographer who is pursuing one of life’s big questions with intensity and focused intention. He is studying war, and its effects on many things: the physical shape of our cities and natural environments, social memory, the psychology of societies, and more.

He is examining genocide; imperialism; the interconnectedness of war, land and military space; and how wars are being fought at the same time with supercomputers, satellites, outdated weapons and equipment, people on the ground, intercepted communications, and manipulated and manipulating media.

More here.

Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker:

Since the Middle Ages, habeas corpus—“You should have the body”—has been the principal means in Anglo-American jurisprudence by which prisoners can challenge their incarceration. In habeas-corpus proceedings, the government is required to bring a prisoner—the body—before a judge and provide a legal rationale for his continued imprisonment. The concept was so well established at the time of the founding of the American Republic that the framers of the Constitution allowed suspensions of the right only under narrow circumstances. Article I, Section 9, states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Such suspensions have been rare in American history. The most recent occasion was in 1871, when President Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops to South Carolina to stop attacks by the Ku Klux Klan against newly emancipated black citizens. This fall, however, Congress passed, and President Bush signed, a new law banning the four hundred and thirty detainees held at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, and other enemy combatants, from filing writs of habeas corpus.

More here.

Carl Zimmer at his blog, The Loom:

Well, the talk at Cornell last week went very well. Thanks to everyone who came. If you want to hear me wax rhapsodic about parasite manipulations (and explain how scientists study their evolution), you’re in luck. Cornell has put the video of the talk online. The image is pretty small on the screen, so I decided to post the slide show on my web site here. I suggest opening two screens and advancing the slides as the talk progresses.

At first the sound is a little scratchy on the video and the light balance takes a while to get properly adjusted. But don’t give up–it evens out. You may also hear a baby gurgling from time to time.

Near the end, when I talk about cuckoo birds as parasites, I refer to their host in one of the pictures as a cowbird. I should have said a reed warbler.

And if you are curious to find out more, check out my book, Parasite Rex.

Update: Apparently the video doesn’t work for some readers. I am at a loss.