In The New York Times:

A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone.

But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.

The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers was able to decipher many inscriptions and reconstruct the gear functions, revealing, they said, “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period.”

The researchers, led by Tony Freeth and Mike G. Edmunds, both of the University of Cardiff, Wales, are reporting the results of their study in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

They said their findings showed that the inscriptions related to lunar-solar motions and the gears were a mechanical representation of the irregularities of the Moon’s orbital course across the sky, as theorized by the astronomer Hipparchos. They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C.

“The Arab world’s passage from progressive secularism to conservative religiosity in the last fifty years is illuminated by the work of Egypt’s greatest writer.”

Tarek Osman in openDemocracy.net:

The death on 30 August 2006 of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz – the sole Arab writer to receive the Nobel prize in literature – was marked around the world, and by many of those unable to read a word of his work in its original language. This universal moment, however, was primarily an Egyptian and Arab one, and for more even than the loss of a great writer. For Naguib Mahfouz’s death is also a symbol of the demise of Arab liberalism. It is a century’s story, and the “Dostoyevsky of Cairo” was the one whose books embodied it.

A century ago, the west was not worryingly eyeing the Arab world, with a fear of suicide-bombers and plane hijackers. It was colonising the Arab world – for a number of reasons: the strategic location, the Suez canal, securing trade routes, access to the Indian subcontinent, protection of minorities, exploitation of economic resources, building empires, civilising the savage Saracens.

In resisting the colonists, the Arabs were broadly divided into two camps: the rejectionists and the integrationists.

The rejectionists were predominately Islamists and Salafis: the group that saw the Arab world’s humiliation and defeat as a consequence of its abandonment of the righteous path prescribed in the Qu’ran and the Prophet Mohammed’s sunna.

The integrationists, on the other side of the intellectual spectrum, saw the Arabs’ defeat as a consequence of their lagging behind in all aspects of modern thinking; they saw a dire need for the integration of western modernity into the traditional Arabic/Islamic culture. As one notable integrationist – Taha Hussein, the legendary Egyptian education minister in the early 20th century – put it: “it’s the enlightenment”.

More here.

From Cosmos Magazine:

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, said they trained honeybees to stick out their proboscis – the tube they use to feed on nectar – when they smell explosives in anything from cars and roadside bombs to belts similar to those used by suicide bombers.

“Scientists have long marveled at the honey bee’s phenomenal sense of smell, which rivals that of dogs,” said Tim Haarmann, who led the research, dubbed the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project. “But previous attempts to harness and understand this ability were scientifically unproven. With more knowledge, our team thought we could make use of this ability.”

Using Pavlovian training techniques in which bees were exposed to the odour of explosives followed by a sugar water reward, researchers said they had trained bees to recognise substances ranging from dynamite and C-4 plastic explosives to the Howitzer propellant grains used in improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The Nobel Prize is the highest award in science. Its recipients include nearly every member of the pantheon of secular gods we revere–from Albert Einstein to Marie Curie, along with more recent notables such as James Watson and Francis Crick.

Every December, the current year’s crop of new science Laureates travel to Stockholm to receive their Prizes. While they are there, Nobelprize.org, t he official website of the Nobel Foundation, interviews them for the archives. This year, Nobelprize.org is offering visitors to Scientific American.com the chance to pose questions to the Laureates.

More here.

From Nature:

There are many good reasons to believe that we all have our own unique smell. Dogs, for example — as pets or police sniffers — seem to be able to distinguish individuals by their smell. And the mother-baby bond is cemented by their own distinctive odours. Now a large and systematic study led by Dustin Penn from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology in Vienna, Austria, has provided stronger support for the notion that your smell might distinguish you from others — maybe even as much as your face. The researchers further suggest that profiles of individual odours may also fall into two groups according to gender — men more commonly have some smelly compounds, women more commonly others.

The researchers took samples of armpit sweat, urine and spit from 197 adults. Each subject was sampled five times over a ten-week collecting period. They extracted thousands of volatile chemicals from the samples — the type of compound most likely to have an odour — and identified them by chromatography and mass spectrometry. The team found many more different volatile chemicals in sweat than in urine or saliva, it reports in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This could be because humans have a reason to be able to distinguish themselves by general body odour, more than by marking territory as many other animals do.

More here.

In Foreign Affairs, Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik, and Arvind Subramanian on economic devlopment:

The contrasting experiences of eastern Asia, China, and India suggest that the secret of poverty-reducing growth lies in creating business opportunities for domestic investors, including the poor, through institutional innovations that are tailored to local political and institutional realities. Ignoring these realities carries the risk that pro-poor policies, even when they are part of apparently sound and well-intentioned IMF and World Bank programs, will be captured by local elites.

Wealthy nations and international development organizations thus should not operate as if the right policies and institutional arrangements are the same across time and space. Yet current WTO rules on subsidies, foreign investment, and patents preclude some of the policy choices made, for example, by South Korea and Taiwan in the past, when rules under the WTO’s predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, were more permissive. What is more, new WTO members typically confront demands to conform their trade and industrial policies to standards that go well beyond existing WTO agreements. The new Basle II international banking standards, better fitted to banks in industrialized nations, risk making it more difficult for banks in developing countries to compete.

To be sure, not all internationally imposed economic discipline is harmful. The principle of transparency, enshrined in international trade agreements and many global financial codes, is fully consistent with policy independence, as long as governments are provided leeway with respect to actual policy content. A well-functioning international economic system does need rules. But international rules should regulate the interface between different policies and institutional regimes, not erase them.

Bruce Robbins in the Valve on Michael Bérubé and liberalism.

Could I try out one view of Michael Berubé’s book I haven’t heard mentioned? Sure, he’s speaking for academics in the humanities and social sciences whom non-liberals would properly see as liberal. And sure, these people (myself included) are a majority in our departments. But do they see themselves as liberal? Maybe on the phone at home, when reluctantly answering some pollster’s questions in a tongue they know to be alien. But at work, I don’t think so. In literature departments (I teach in one) “liberal” is more often than not a dirty word.

For example, Berubé’s liberalism means secularism. But secularism is by no means English department dogma. On the contrary, the big fashion these days is to declare oneself post-secular; it’s everywhere. This unbending to religion should not be a surprise. After all, the critique of Enlightenment rationality is what English departments were founded on. You can still get more or less automatic assent, if not necessarily wild cheering or a reputation for originality, by rising to denounce any of that rationality’s assumptions or moving parts. Remember, Nietzsche is still the biggest philosopher in this neighborhood. Not a democrat, and not a liberal.

No, I’m not crazy about this. But there are sides of the deep anti-liberal bias in English departments that I have more time for. The active discussion about Burkean conservatism where I live–and you should know that there is one– centers on whether Burke wasn’t after all the true leftist, given that the people to his left never had the qualms he had about British imperialism and that his version of agricultural organicism, though it didn’t stop him from welcoming enclosures, certainly offered a better defense of India than anything else in the British public sphere.

ONE OF THE great broken promises of the 20th-century view of the future, right up there with personal jet-packs, was the promise of artificial intelligence. AI was supposed to lead to computers that wouldn’t just calculate and organize, but reason and analyze; computers that could really think, like HAL in “2001” or KITT on the 1980s TV show “Knight Rider.” (Of course, HAL turned out to be a homicidal psychopath and KITT was a smug know-it-all, but still, it seemed like a good idea.)

Recent efforts to realize the promise of AI have centered on teaching computers to better deduce meaning from the vast content of the Web, but there’s still a long way to go. In the meantime, however, there’s an alternative type of computerized system that is actually making big strides toward getting computers to think like humans. Publisher Tim O’Reilly calls it intelligence augmentation (IA for short), and it uses a very clever technique. It cheats.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

The ruins of Shanghai come as a surprise in a city so defiantly modern. Demolished low-rise houses lie in downtown streets next to luxury condominiums with names such as ‘Rich Gate’, the wreckage reflected in the glass façades of tall office buildings. In Dongjiadu, Shanghai’s oldest quarter, bulldozers were expected within the fortnight, the old women squatting silently in the cramped alleys helpless before them.

But you can’t get too sentimental about Shanghai, a place built, like Bombay, in the 19th century on the back of the opium trade. An axis of gangsters, politicians and foreign businessmen ruled the city until the Communist takeover in 1949. Those decades of semi-colonial occupation, when Shanghai came to be known as the ‘Whore of Asia’, glow with old-fashioned glamour in Chinese cinema, in Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, or Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon. But the corpses of thousands of the poor were collected every year from the pavements of the International Settlement.

more from the LRB here.

So there are three more-or-less mutually exclusive spheres of influence at play in “Magritte and Contemporary Art”: those displaying formal visual correspondences with the Belgian’s paintings (Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins), those exploring strictly language-based paradoxes in their art (Mel Bochner, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth), and those dealing with Magritte’s legacy of pop-culture market saturation (Douglas Huebler, Jim Shaw, Sherrie Levine). In terms of the works assembled for the exhibition, the last category predictably gets the short shrift, although Pierce Brosnan gives plenty of audio-tour airtime to Shaw’s deliciously prole reading of Magritte’s significance.

But overwhelming that token populist concession, overwhelming the gift shop with its bowler hats and “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” ashtrays —overwhelming everything else when it comes right down to it — is the dazzling, absurd installation designed by John Baldessari. Alongside subtler homages (the security guards wearing bowler hats), Baldessari has carpeted the entire first floor of the Ahmanson with cloud-patterned wall-to-wall and paneled the ceiling with aerial photos of an L.A. freeway interchange, creating a sandwich of disorientation from which Magritte’s cheese emerges triumphant. It’s a courageous and unexpected elevation of Magritte’s stigmatic kitsch-cred to a transcendent and domineering immersiveness. The ridiculous has seldom looked so sublime.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From Harper’s:

Senator John McCain said that American troops in Iraq were “fighting and dying for a failed policy”; Henry Kissinger said that he didn’t believe a military victory in Iraq is possible;[The New York Times] and Army Specialist James Barker admitted that he had raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and helped murder her family in March 2006.[BBC News] Tony Blair told Al Jazeera that western intervention in Iraq had been “pretty much of a disaster,”[Times Online] and 40 firefighters in the United Kingdom carried out a two-hour rescue operation to bring a sheep down from a ledge.[Sky News] Syria’s foreign minister visited Iraq to discuss renewing diplomatic relations between the two nations,[Al Jazeera] and a researcher in Germany claimed that the swords of Damascus, which were made from a type of steel known as wootz, have a microstructure of carbon nanotubes.[Nature] Economist Milton Friedman died[The New York Times] and the price of oil stabilized;[BBC News] football coach Bo Schembechler died and Ohio State beat Michigan 42-39.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

With its conspicuous blue eyes and shiny orange claws, this colorful crab seems hard to miss. But it’s one of many species that had likely never been seen until scientists went exploring in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument this fall.

An international team of biologists made the discoveries in October during a three-week survey of a remote coral atoll called French Frigate Shoals.

More here.

Vincent Desiderio. Woman in White Dress. 2003.

Oil on linen.

More on this talented American artist here and here.

“The US must develop a compelling bid to host the International Linear Collider in order to safeguard American science.”

Harold T. Shapiro in Seed Magazine:

Physics in the United States is at a crossroads. There are scientific discoveries just within reach whose impact is likely to transform and even transcend the field. Yet US particle physics facilities are being closed or converted to other uses, federal investments are stagnating, and the intellectual center of gravity is moving overseas with the construction of new facilities in Europe and Japan.

These were the conclusions of the committee for the National Academy of Sciences, which I had the honor of chairing. Our mandate was to examine the current state, and make recommendations regarding the future shape, of a US particle physics program that has yielded innumerable discoveries and played a defining role in American scientific leadership.

More here.

Rashod D. Ollison in the Baltimore Sun:

Free of irony or tongue-in-cheek cleverness, so-called “minstrel rap” appears to be a throwback to the days when performers (some black, some white) rubbed burnt cork on their faces and depicted African-Americans as buffoons. Excluding Ms. Peachez, these new millennium minstrel rappers don’t sport painted faces. But the music, dances and images in the videos are clearly reminiscent of the era when pop culture reduced blacks to caricatures: lazy “coons,” grinning “pickaninnies,” sexually super-charged “bucks.”

“Minstrelsy has never died. It has evolved,” says Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, associate professor of theater at Virginia Commonwealth University. Through The Conciliation Project, a nonprofit arts organization she oversees, Pettiford-Wates uses old minstrelsy to spark open dialogue about racism in modern America. “My problem with minstrel hip-hop is that it exploits the images but doesn’t put them in any context. You just get these images and no desire to unmask or interrogate them.”

More here.

At least in Brezhnev’s time you knew where you stood. We had no illusions. Public life was black and white. Censorship was overwhelming. Journalists wrote under instruction and according to the social and political orders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Now, in the new Russia of sushi bars and oligarchs, the situation is more shameful and rotten than it was then. The attempted assassination of Alexander Litvinenko might not be all that it seems, and yet it does fit a pattern. It follows only a few weeks after the murder of my good friend, the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya. There have since been other, less publicised, cases. Another investigative reporter, Fatima Tlisova, was poisoned two weeks ago in north Caucasus; on 18 November the former head of security in Chechnya, who had fallen out with the region’s prime minister, was gunned down in the centre of Moscow in broad daylight by Chechen and Russian police. And then this . . . the mysterious poisoning of Litvinenko (in a sushi restaurant, naturally), but this time in the centre of Russia’s second city, London.

more from The New Statesman here.

As long as reputable sovereign and financial entities have issued value-bearing notes, disreputable personages have attempted to imitate them for nefarious purposes. At times the counterfeiters have been nearly as productive as the legitimate mints. In the mid-nineteenth century, some forty percent of all American currency was fake. But “fake” here is a relative term. With literally thousands of currencies circulating at the time, legal tender in Cincinnati might be little more than tinder-box fodder in Columbus. National currencies, too, often ended up stoking the auto-da-fé; those of the French Bank Royale, the Continental Congress, and the Confederate States are only the most notorious examples. Under such turbulent circumstances, the difference between value and valuelessness, between “real money” and ornate scrap paper, does not admit of definite boundaries.

Perhaps no one has challenged this distinction more effectively than the forgotten Portuguese entrepreneur and swindler Arturo Alves Reis. The latter epithet, though certainly apt, fails to capture the true essence of his crimes, which were both outlandishly reckless and touchingly devoid of malice.

more from Cabinet here.

Charles McGrath in the New York Times Magazine:

For some reason, Northern Ireland produces poets the way the Dominican Republic does baseball players. The M.V.P., the Pedro Martínez, is of course Seamus Heaney — or Famous Seamus, as he became known after winning the Nobel Prize in 1995. In the next generation there are a number of up-and-coming stars, including Frank Ormsby, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and the poet most likely to inherit Heaney’s mantle, if he hasn’t already, Paul Muldoon. The first meeting of Heaney and Muldoon, at a county museum in Armagh in the late 60s, has been embroidered in some accounts into a mystical laying on of hands and a landmark of Irish literary legend — an occasion as momentous in its way as the first meeting of James Joyce and the 21-year-old Samuel Beckett.

More here.

From The Economist:

If you have ever sat alone in a bar, depressed by how good-looking everybody else seems to be, take comfort—it may be evolution playing a trick on you. A study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior by Sarah Hill, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin, shows that people of both sexes reckon the sexual competition they face is stronger than it really is. She thinks that is useful: it makes people try harder to attract or keep a mate.

Dr Hill showed heterosexual men and women photographs of people. She asked them to rate both how attractive those of their own sex would be to the opposite sex, and how attractive the members of the opposite sex were. She then compared the scores for the former with the scores for the latter, seen from the other side. Men thought that the men they were shown were more attractive to women than they really were, and women thought the same of the women.

Dr Hill had predicted this outcome, thanks to error-management theory—the idea that when people (or, indeed, other animals) make errors of judgment, they tend to make the error that is least costly. The notion was first proposed by Martie Haselton and David Buss, two of Dr Hill’s colleagues, to explain a puzzling quirk in male psychology.

More here.  [Photo shows average looking schmo Paul Newman, who I once stupidly believed is better looking than me.]

Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books:

Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world. In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush’s chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:

“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, “in order to make a point that we’re not going to live in this world that they want for us.”

Though to anyone familiar with Kissinger’s “realist” rhetoric of power and credibility his analysis will come as no surprise, Gerson, the deeply religious idealist who composed Bush’s most soaring music about “ending tyranny” and “ridding the world of evil,” seems mildly disappointed: Kissinger “viewed Iraq purely in the context of power politics. It was not idealism. He didn’t seem to connect with Bush’s goal of promoting democracy.”

More here.