“Einstein’s philosophical habit of mind, cultivated by undergraduate training and lifelong dialogue, had a profound effect on the way he did physics.”

Don A. Howard in Physics Today:

Nowadays, explicit engagement with the philosophy of science plays almost no role in the training of physicists or in physics research. What little the student learns about philosophical issues is typically learned casually, by a kind of intellectual osmosis. One picks up ideas and opinions in the lecture hall, in the laboratory, and in collaboration with one’s supervisor. Careful reflection on philosophical ideas is rare. Even rarer is systematic instruction. Worse still, publicly indulging an interest in philosophy of science is often treated as a social blunder. To be fair, more than a few physicists do think philosophically. Still, explicitly philosophical approaches to physics are the exception. Things were not always so.

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Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal:

Many books have over the years commented on Shakespeare’s knowledge of soldiering, sailing and navigation, the law, and so forth; and I have accumulated a small library of books, both British and American, written over the last century and a half, by doctors commenting on Shakespeare’s medical knowledge.

For the most part, these volumes are compilations of every conceivable medical reference in Shakespeare, arranged by play, by disease, or by relevant medical specialty. They include Ernest Jones’s famous—or perhaps “notorious” would be a better word—analysis of Hamlet’s Oedipus complex, and a much more recent volume on Shakespeare and neurobiology. The general tone is respectful astonishment at the accuracy of many of Shakespeare’s medical observations.

No medical author, as far as I know, has suggested as a consequence that Shakespeare must have had a medical training, though many have suggested that he might have picked up medical knowledge from his son-in-law, a university-trained physician. His name was Dr. John Hall: he held a degree from Cambridge and probably had studied on the continent as well. However, Hall settled in Stratford only in 1600 and married Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, in 1608. By then, of course, Shakespeare had written most of his plays and made most of his medical observations and allusions: Hall, therefore, could not have been the chief source of his medical knowledge.

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Alex Kumi in The Guardian:

At first sight it is little more than a poetic polemic about the virtues of an effective leader. But a poem has been removed from school textbooks in Pakistan after it became clear that the first letter of each line spelt out “President George W Bush”.

Penned by an anonymous writer, The Leader embarrassed education officials in the country after it found its way into an English textbook for 16-year-olds…

Here’s the whole poem:

Patient and steady with all he must bear,
Ready to accept every challenge with care,
Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,
Strong in his faith, refreshingly real,
Isn’t afraid to propose what is bold,
Doesn’t conform to the usual mold,
Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight wont do
Never back down when he sees what is true
Tells it all straight, and means it all too

Bracing for war, but praying for peace
Using his power so evil will cease:
So much a leader and worthy of trust,
Here stands a man who will do what he must

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John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

A bit of information is “common knowledge” among a group of people if all parties know it, know that the others know it, know that the others know they know it, and so on. It is much more than “mutual knowledge,” which requires only that the parties know the particular bit of information, not that they be aware of the others’ knowledge. As Aumann showed, one can prove a theorem that can be roughly paraphrased as follows: Two individuals cannot forever agree to disagree. As their beliefs, formed in rational response to different bits of private information, gradually become common knowledge, their beliefs change and eventually coincide.

Very abstract stuff, but there is an interesting example that demonstrates how the notion might enable us to explain sudden bubbles or sudden crashes in stock markets. These changes, which sometimes seem to be precipitated by nothing at all, might be the result of “subterranean information processing.”

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David Biello in Scientific American:

In the 1930s French scientists determined that bees could not fly. They knew, of course, that the insects could and did. But according to their calculations, this feat was aerodynamically impossible. They based that conclusion on the fact that wings as small as a bee’s could not possibly produce enough lift to allow the bee to get airborne. The problem was, they presumed that the bee’s wings were stable, like an airplane’s, when in fact honeybees flap and rotate their wings 240 times a second. This flapping, along with the supple nature of the wings themselves, allows a bee–or any flying insect, for that matter–to create a vortex that lifts it into the air. But the specific aerodynamic mechanics of that process as it pertains to the honeybee, with its stubby wings, has remained a mystery until now.

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Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times:

Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement’s credibility.

On college campuses, the movement’s theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.

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Mark Peplow in Nature:

Malicious computer viruses could be stopped in their tracks by immunity software that spreads faster than the virus itself, says a team of computer experts from Israel.

Their proposal relies on setting up a network of shortcuts through the Internet that only antiviral programs can use, allowing them to immunize computers before a virus arrives.

Eran Shir of Tel Aviv University began thinking about the problem when the infamous Blaster worm spread across the Internet in 2003. “It really got me annoyed,” he recalls. “Conventional antivirus software just couldn’t keep up with its spread.”

More here.

James Forsyth in The New Republic:

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s British directors like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach portrayed the upper class as uncaring and contemptuous of the rest of society. These films never made much of an impression–or serious money–on the other side of the Atlantic. However, they were popular enough to affect the cultural climate at home. Then, in 1994, the British movie industry shifted gears and started making the upper class loveable. Why? Because it wanted to make it big on the American side of the pond. Hollywood has had a long love affair with posh Brits; think David Niven, Peter O’Toole, and virtually all the Merchant Ivory films. But this time around the Brits churned out not historical fantasies but contemporary social comedies.

The first of these was the low-budget Four Weddings and a Funeral. The movie cost $6 million to make but grossed $52 million at the U.S. box office alone. It also earned two Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. In the movie, an upper class Brit–played by Hugh Grant–falls in love with an American woman played by Andie MacDowell. Grant’s character was bumbling yet sympathetic, miles from the Leigh and Loach stereotype.

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Jim Erickson in Time Magazine:

Officials and business leaders meeting in New Delhi could not have asked for more auspicious news as they gathered last week for the World Economic Forum’s annual India Economic Summit. While the three-day event was in progress, the Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex index hit all-time highs. That milestone was followed by the cheering news that the Indian economy grew at an 8% rate during the quarter ending Sept. 30, underscoring once-moribund India’s claim to being the fastest-growing free-market democracy in the world.

There’s a reason, however, that the boast requires qualifiers. Undemocratic, not-so-free-market China continues to set the economic pace with GDP growth exceeding 9%—a fact that seemed to dampen enthusiasm in New Delhi in the face of otherwise encouraging circumstances. In Asia, “China is clearly the leader of the flock,” conceded India’s Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram. “India is still just part of the flock.” That chronic inferiority complex is rooted in industrial policy envy. China maintains a big advantage over India in sectors such as manufacturing, said Chidambaram, because its central government dictates “with brutal efficiency” such initiatives as the construction of commerce-greasing infrastructure projects.

More here.

What do these two little epiphanies add up to? Only this: The different ends of this or that aspect of modernism or modernity that many of us proclaimed, rightly or wrongly, over the last three decades might have blinded us, at least in part, to one narrative, perhaps the grandest of all, that continues unabated, even unabashed: the narrative of modernization. What might count as a dialectical engagement, critical yet non-nostalgic, resistant yet utopian, with its most important manifestations today? Neither a new “new vision,” I imagine, nor old-school practices that pretend nothing has changed. In the new year I hope some artists will point a way forward.

more in Artforum here.

“Taste has no system and no proofs”—this much we know. But some 40 years after the critic Susan Sontag made this and other observations on the good, the bad, and the in-between, the times have a-changed: Irony and camp have recast taste as an ethical shell game and we feel no guilt celebrating things that are, in the parlance of VH1, Awesomely Bad. But are there still songs that qualify as “bad”? Consider the Los Angeles hip-hop quartet the Black Eyed Peas. Their current single, “My Humps,” is one of the most popular hit singles in history. It is also proof that a song can be so bad as to veer toward evil.

more from Slate here.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think a reader unacquainted with [African-American] folklore can properly understand your work?

ELLISON

Yes, I think so. It’s like jazz; there’s no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it. We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even “Little Red Riding Hood.” The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. I noticed, incidentally, that the Germans, having no special caste assumptions concerning American Negroes, dealt with my work simply as a novel. I think the Americans will come to view it that way in twenty years–if it’s around that long.

more from the Paris Review here.

From The Guardian:

After his life as a crime reporter in a Canadian city took a turn for the worse, Jeremy Mercer decided to head for Paris, where he happened upon the city’s most famous bookshop, the legendary Shakespeare and Co. In Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs, Mercer describes the time he spent living in the bookshop, the people he met and his relationship with the shop’s octogenarian owner. Here he chooses his 10 favourite bookshops from around the world.
“Bookstores are sanctuaries. Places to lose yourself, escape the harsh demands of daily life, find new ways to dream and new sources of inspiration. I love all booksellers; anybody who helps spread the word is doing noble work. But my favourite bookstores are the small eccentric independents run by passionate and usually slightly mad book lovers. These are some of the best.”

More here.

From Science:

Seniors don’t need to do everything the health magazines recommend to stay fit. A new study with older women shows that either snoozing right or maintaining a good social network is enough to reduce levels of an inflammatory compound linked to bad health.

It’s well known that lifestyle characteristics such as sleep and relationships can affect health. For example, seniors who sleep badly or have few close friends and relations generally have more health problems and die younger than their peers. But what’s behind the trend? Previous research indicates than an inflammatory molecule in the body called IL-6 is present at high levels in people who sleep badly. Just as high cholesterol puts one at risk for heart disease, high IL-6 increases the risk of a variety of ailments associated with age, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and arthritis.

More here.

Paul Celan’s reception in America has always been connected to his status as the great Holocaust poet, the poet who showed that, Adorno’s caveat notwithstanding, it was possible to write poetry, even great poetry in the German language, after Auschwitz. As “poet, survivor, Jew” (the subtitle of John Felstiner’s groundbreaking study of 1995), Celan became the iconic poet for advanced theory, his elusive lyrics endlessly mined for their post-Holocaust wisdom by Continental philosophers from Hans-Georg Gadamer to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. The result, ironically, has been to place Celan in a kind of solitary confinement, a private cell in which his every “circumcised word” (Jacques Derrida’s term in his essay “Shibboleth for Paul Celan”) can be examined for its allegorical weight and theological import, even as, Pierre Joris suggests in the superb introduction to his new Selections, its actual poetic forms and choices are taken for granted. “Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading of Celan in our time,” writes Charles Bernstein, “is that we have venerated him, in the process of removing him not only from his own time and place, but also from our own poetic horizon. . . . a crippling exceptionalism has made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice.”

more from the Boston Review here.

In the California Literary Review, an interview with Mary Roach, author of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

The Near Death Experience is something that seems to have happened to many people. How do people describe the experience? Are scientists investigating this? What are the results so far?

There are a few core elements of the NDE, as researchers call it: floating up above yourself, whooshing down a tunnel, moving toward a light, seeing dead loved ones who often tell you “it’s not your time.” The experience is pretty universal, though there’s often a unique cultural overlay: for instance, a man in China was told “there’s been a clerical error,” rather than “it’s not your time.” A truck driver sped down “a tailpipe” rather than a tunnel.

A team of cardiologists and psychiatrists at the University of Virginia are taking a simple, rather elegant approach to trying to find out whether people who have these experiences are hallucinating or are actually leaving their bodies. They’ve got a laptop computer taped, flat open, on top of the highest cardiac monitor in an operating room, such that the only way you could see what’s on the screen would be if you were floating up by the ceiling. You can’t see the image (one of several rotating images, randomly chosen) from down below. Patients are interviewed after they leave the OR, to see if they report having seen anything. So far, none of the patients has had an NDE, but the project had only just begun when I was there.

It is the vocabulary one expects from a French intellectual in the first years of the Fifth Republic: oblivion, the abyss, la mort. There’s a quest for authenticity, with the writer claiming “sincerity” as his ultimate aim. The war years loom large, even as the nation settles into an era of prosperity. But instead of the heroic existentialist writer holding the line against nothingness, we encounter a beguiling magician, a brilliant prankster preoccupied with word games and puzzles, a master illusionist with an introspective bent: Georges Perec, that inimitable amalgam of Kafka and the daily crossword, whose sensibility spans opposing poles of profundity and artifice. Among the ghosts of twentieth-century novelists that still haunt us, his takes its place as the group’s ingenious poltergeist, albeit one with a rather melancholy aura. The unruly shrub of hair, the sly grin, the tender, somewhat sad gaze: Perec figures as the impish wordsmith confronting a fathomless void, as if Sartre had cloaked himself in the guise of Pierrot.

more from Bookforum here.

From Scientific American:

More than one in 500 children have some form of autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control. All autistic children suffer from an impaired ability to communicate and relate to others, but some of them are able to socially interact to a greater degree than their peers. A recent study of a group of these so-called high functioning autistics suggests the neurological basis for their social impairment.

Neuroscientist Mirella Dapretto of the University of California Los Angeles and her colleagues surveyed the brains of 10 autistic children and an equal number of nonautistic children as they watched and imitated 80 different faces displaying either anger, fear, happiness, sadness or no emotion. By measuring the amount of blood flowing to certain regions of the children’s brains with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, the researchers could determine what parts of the brain were being used as the subjects completed the tasks. The autistic children differed from their peers in only one respect: each showed reduced activity in the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus–a brain region located near the temple.

More here.

From The New York Times:

SEATTLE – Addressing 275 of the world’s most brilliant scientists, Bill Gates cracked a joke: “I’ve been applying my imagination to the synergies of this,” he said. “We could have sorghum that cures latent tuberculosis. We could have mosquitoes that spread vitamin A. And most important, we could have bananas that never need to be kept cold.” They laughed. Perhaps that was to be expected when the world’s richest man, who had just promised them $450 million, was delivering a punchline. But it was also germane, because they were gathered to celebrate some of the oddest-sounding projects in the history of science.

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Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

Osama bin Laden’s old school—the Al Thagher Model School—sits on several dozen arid acres lined by eucalyptus trees, whose branches have been twisted by winds from the Red Sea. The campus spreads north from the Old Mecca Road, near downtown Jedda, the Saudi Arabian port city where bin Laden spent most of his childhood and teen-age years. The school’s main building is a two-story rectangle constructed from concrete and fieldstone in a featureless modern style. Inside, dim hallways connect two wings of classrooms. In bin Laden’s day—he graduated in 1976—there was a wing for middle-school students, and another for the high school. Between them is a spacious interior courtyard, and from the second floor students could lean over balcony railings and shout at their classmates below, or pelt them with wads of paper. Most Al Thagher students, including bin Laden, were commuters, but there were a few boarders; they lived on the second floor, as did some of the school’s foreign teachers. It was in this upstairs dormitory, a schoolmate of bin Laden’s told me, that a young Syrian physical-education teacher led an after-school Islamic study group for a few outstanding boys, and it was there, beginning at about age fourteen, that bin Laden received his first formal education in some of the precepts of violent jihad.

More here.