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.

More here.

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.

Brian Handwerk in National Geographic News:

Lee and Berkeley colleague Robert Szema wrote on the state of animal-eye optics research in a recent issue of the journal Science.

In his lab, Lee is refining three-dimensional polymer structures that can mimic the components of an eye, from lenses to light receptors. He believes soft, flexible polymers may be the key to replicating natural sight systems that outperform their mechanized competition.

“Many, many biologists have studied animals’ eyes,” Lee said. “Some of those studies are decades old. But they didn’t have the tools to make the artificial structures that are now possible.

“[Now is] really a good time to figure out how to make complex three-dimensional structures, like compound eyes.”

More here.

Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books:

Great architects are often blamed for the sins of their copyists. The twentieth century’s most influential master builder, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, saw his daring reduction of the tall building into glass skin and steel bones debased by postwar developers who quickly grasped how profitable that formula could be if stripped of his fine materials and exquisite details. In the 1960s, the pervasiveness of inferior versions of Mies’s designs incited Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to advocate, in such books as Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas as well as in their own buildings, a richer vocabulary of historical and vernacular allusions; but opportunistic postmodernists perverted their ideas into mere styling tips.

Frank Gehry is the latest to suffer that galling form of flattery. The global ballyhoo that surrounded the debut of his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of 1991–1997 presaged an outbreak of hideous imitations. Yet Gehry’s idiosyncratic expressionism cannot be mimicked with as much facility as Mies’s minimalism or Venturi and Scott Brown’s mannerism. Indeed, the onus of plagiarism lies most heavily on Gehry himself, as each new client expects the next Bilbao. Gehry’s influence has been less specific in its effects on architectural style but no less significant: the example of Bilbao has encouraged establishment patrons to award commissions to a younger generation of experimental architects whom they never would have considered before. And none of them has benefited more from Gehry’s impact than Santiago Calatrava, architecture’s newest superstar.

More here.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Self-portrait, Prague, Czechoslovakia,1989.

More here.

Current Exhibition.

Amir Hadad writes for Haaretz.com about the transformation of Matisyahu Miller into the first ultra-Orthodox reggae singer :

“I was 16, I looked like a hippie, I wasn’t into Judaism. I was into music, reggae, Bob Marley, girls. My parents wanted me to travel. They signed me up for this three-month program and paid for it, and that’s how I got to the Alexander Muss High School in Hod Hasharon. The way it worked there was that in the morning you learn about Judaism, about Israel, and in the evening they switched to more general topics and the rest of the time they take you on all kinds of little trips within Israel, to a different place each time, so you’ll feel Israel. It wasn’t something religious. It was more about connecting to your Jewish roots, getting to know Israel a little.

“After a few weeks,” continues the man formerly known as Matthew Miller, “they took us to Mount Scopus to look at the view of Jerusalem. The people who take you there know very well why they’re doing it. It has a big effect on a person to go up to this place, to overlook Jerusalem from above. It sounds a little corny, I know, but it totally does the job. You stand up there, overlooking this incredible city, and you sing `Jerusalem of Gold’ and something big moves in your heart. It was the first time that I felt my soul, that I really felt it. I felt God.”

Thus began the transformation of a non-religious Jewish boy from a wealthy New York suburb to the world’s first and most successful ultra-Orthodox reggae singer, known today as Matisyahu Miller”

More here

“A leading neuropsychologist explains how he adapted his best-selling book on the brain, soul and ‘self’ for a theatre audience.”

Paul Broks in The Guardian:

I have never bargained with the Prince of Darkness but I do get drawn into wrangles over the soul. They are mostly benign but one woman came to the brink of physical assault. It was during a talk I gave at a literary festival. She told the organisers she just wanted to shake me by the lapels. What had I done to upset her? I’d said that studying brain function and working with brain-damaged people had led me to certain views about the nature of personal identity; that neuroscience had no place for the soul; that the human brain was a storytelling machine, and that the self was a story.

I said that our deepest intuitions about what it means to be a person are based on an illusion. There is no inner essence, no ego, no observing ‘I’, no ghost in the machine. The story is all and, moreover, the story is enough. It was nothing personal. I’ve reeled off my litany of self-annihilation ad nauseam since Into the Silent Land was published. Sometimes I feel like shaking myself by the lapels.

The book explores love, loss and personal transformation through neurological case stories and speculative fiction. But if the scientific assault on the soul is one of its themes, so too is the limitation of science.

More here.

Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

To English literary theorist Terry Eagleton, [Slavoj] Zizek stands as “the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe in some decades.”

To Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker, however, “always to take Slavoj Zizek seriously would be to make a category mistake.” His appeal, she wrote, is “accessible absurdity,” a Seinfeldian attention to the “minutiae of popular culture.”

Zizek’s style is to juxtapose highly theoretical notions like Marx’s surplus value or Jacques Lacan’s “big Other” with the down-and-dirty “readings” of pop culture familiar from cultural studies. As critic Scott McLemee, a close Zizek observer, has noted, the famously verbose lecturer once explained “the distinctions between German philosophy, English political economy, and the French Revolution by reference to each nation’s toilet design.”

When people speak (and they do) of Zizek’s reputation preceding him, much of that rep – or rap – comes from articles on him by three American journalists over the years: Robert Boynton’s astute 1998 Lingua Franca profile, Mead’s 2003 New Yorker portrait (headlined “The Marx Brother”), and the “Zizek Watch” conducted a while back by McLemee, now a columnist for Inside Higher Education.

More here.

Jane and Michael Stern review Walter Gratzer’s book in the New York Times:

To eat is basic instinct; how to do it correctly worries humans more than sex. So “Terrors of the Table” is a perfect title for this story of nutritional doctrine’s tyranny up to modern times when, in Walter Gratzer’s words, fear of cholesterol has “supplanted the Devil as the roaring lion who walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” Gratzer, a biophysicist at King’s College, London, who previously put a human face on science in “Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes,” reels out a historical pageant of science and pseudoscience teeming with remarkable characters who have advanced (and retarded) knowledge about what makes humans thrive.

The faddists on soapboxes are especially amusing, including vegetarians who denounce eating meat as ungodly and an anti-vegetarian cleric who answers that God attached white tails to rabbits to make them easier targets. Gratzer asserts that fashion, not science, rules contemporary diet advice, and he enjoys eviscerating the “gruesome” Duke rice diet, the “probably dangerous” Scarsdale diet and the “grossly unbalanced” Atkins diet.

More here.  [There is also a slide show which includes the picture of Dr. Robert Atkins above.]

Johan Ugander writes to me from Sweden:

I would like to share a speech that aired on Swedish television with  the readers of 3qd. In Sweden, we have something called “Stora  Journalistpriset”, or the “Big Journalism Prize”. During this year’s prize ceremony, the keynote speaker was one Hugh Miles, who was 
involved in the 2004 “Control Room” documentary, and author of the  recent book “Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenges America.”

The complete speech is available on the internet, and I found very enlightened. It is linked from http://www.storajournalistpriset.se/, by clicking on “Se Brittiske Journalisten High Miles föreläsning  om al-Jazira.”

The video begins with a 2:05 Swedish Introduction, followed by a 4 minutes excerpt from “Control Room”, followed by a spectacular 34 minute speech by Hugh Miles. This is then followed by 6 minutes of Q&A. After the 2 minute introduction everything is in English, and I 
highly recommend it to you and all your readers.

So if there is any reasonable way you can find to link to a video that has a 2 minute non-English introduction, followed by a gold mine of insight, please do.

The best way I could think of was to include your introduction to the video. Thanks, Johan.

Lee Siegel in Slate:

Ever since the romantic comedy-drama She’s Gotta Have It antagonized black women and black men in 1986, Spike Lee’s films have enjoyed the outrage of various groups. Between Do the Right Thing‘s racial and ethnic provocations, however, and last year’s She Hate Me—a sexual farce that offended lesbians and feminists—the social context for Lee’s films has changed. In Hollywood, the bar for racial provocation has been raised to wearying heights. At the same time, nakedly commercial entertainments—blackbusters?—from Barbershop to Get Rich or Die Tryin’ appeal to a black audience that barely existed 20 years ago. Lee’s recently published autobiography, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, offered an occasion to talk with the sometimes inflammatory director about movies, money, race, and the gentle art of making enemies.

More here.

openDemocracy has an interview with Zygmunt Bauman on globalization, war, terrorism, and modernity.

Lukasz Galecki: How do you define the borders of globalisation?

Zygmunt Bauman: Globalisation is not a process taking place somewhere far away in some exotic place. Globalisation is taking place in Leeds as well as in Warsaw, in New York and in any small town in Poland. It is just outside your window, but inside as well. It is enough to walk down the street to see it. Global and local spaces can be separated only as an abstraction, in reality they are intertwined.

The main trouble is that the globalisation we are dealing with today is strictly negative. It is based on the breaking down of barriers, allowing for the globalisation of capital, the movement of goods, information, crime, and terrorism, but not of the political and judicial institutions whose basis is national sovereignty. This negative aspect of globalisation has not been followed by the positive aspect, and the instruments of regulation over economic and social processes are not established enough to deal with the reach and consequences of globalisation.

Globalisation and chaos

Lukasz Galecki: Are there any historical precedents for this situation?

Zygmunt Bauman: Two centuries ago our ancestors were frightened by the naked chaos which could not be tamed by the modest powers of local communities – village, parish, and small town. In those days, the big spaces of action that were about to build nations must have seemed as frightening and open to ambush as the forces of globalisation are to today’s nation-states. Yet our ancestors were capable of building the instruments of political representation and the legislative and judicial means to manage chaos, to coordinate rules and procedures in order to tame this chaos, to make it relatively transparent and more or less predictable.

At Democracy Now!, Mike Palm, chairperson of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee at New York University, and Paul Boghossian, a professor of Philosophy at New York University, debate the NYU grad student strike and the pro’s and con’s of grad student unionization.  (You can listen to the debate as well, there.  Also see Asad’s earlier post on the strike here.)

JUAN GONZALEZ: When you say the grading, when are grades due and what is the role of your union members in that?

MICHAEL PALM: Union members in our union are teaching assistants and also research assistants and some graduate assistants who do administrative type work, but the vast majority are teaching assistants who teach smaller sections for larger lecture classes and do the bulk of the grading in those classes.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your demands?

MICHAEL PALM: Our demand is singular and quite simple, that N.Y.U. sit at the bargaining table with us and negotiate a second contract.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Boghossian, you’re speaking for the N.Y.U. administration. What is your response to that demand?

PAUL BOGHOSSIAN: Well, the basic — the basic thought behind refusing to continue recognizing graduate student union is that we don’t believe that students are employees, and we think that the only people who are really entitled to be represented by a collective bargaining unit and a labor union are people who are primarily employees. Our basic impulse is not to want to lock into place a relationship to our graduate students, whom we treat as developing colleagues, that considers them to be laborers, and we don’t want to institutionalize that relationship.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, your response?

MICHAEL PALM: There’s no question that we are students. We are enrolled as graduate students at N.Y.U., we take classes, we take exams, we write dissertations. There is also no question that we work at N.Y.U., grading papers, working in the offices, working in the labs is work, and there is also no question that our first contract has made us better teachers, researchers and assistants at N.Y.U.

Rena Thirumalai writes:

“Researchers at Singapore-based Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have discovered a way to ‘cybertouch’ by transmitting tactile movements over the internet. A project presented at the CyberWorld International Conference held last week at NTU demonstrated sending touch through the internet using a live chicken.

The process works by dressing the chicken in a ‘sensory jacket’ that can record and transmit the animal’s movements.”

More here

David Rieff in The New York Times:

My mother, Susan Sontag, lived almost her entire 71 years believing that she was a person who would beat the odds. Even during the last nine months of her life, after she was discovered to have myelodysplastic syndrome, or M.D.S., a particularly virulent blood cancer, she continued to persevere in the belief that she would be the exception. M.D.S. is technically a precursor to acute myeloid leukemia. On average, its survival rates across the generational cohorts are no better than 20 percent, and far worse for a woman in her early 70’s who had had cancer twice before. It wasn’t that she didn’t know that the biological deck was stacked against her; as someone who prided herself on her ability to grasp medical facts, she knew it only too well. In the immediate aftermath of her diagnosis, she went online to learn all she could about M.D.S. and despaired as the fact of its lethality sank in. But that despair was almost the flip side of a lifelong confidence in her ability to defy the odds. “This time, for the first time,” she told me, “I don’t feel special.”

More here.

From The Dawn:

Sughra Mehdi, Fahmida Riaz and Sadia Baloch focus on the past history of feminism which many have forgotten or are deliberately trying to erase from memory.

A champion of women’s movement: Khawaja Altaf Hussein Hali
(A few objections and their answers)
By Sughra Mehdi

With the advent of modern thought and the new era, people began to think of the lowly status of women in society. The world over movements for the education and freedom of women were initiated. In English the word “Feminism” began to be used for this movement. Its priorities were varied at different times and in different countries. The reason for this clearly is that the concept of feminism acquired breadth. The feminist movement began in India in the 19th century. The Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and the Theosophical Society stressed the education and freedom of women. Voices were raised against all those traditions in whose name women were targets of oppression and cruelty. The most barbaric form of this was “sati”.

More here:

From Ego:

Picasso painted Le Demoiselle d Avignon after seeing an exhibit of African Masks and sculptures at the MOMA. Paul Gauguin’s life’s works come from Tahiti, where he retreated to after his giving up his profession as a stockbroker. Cultures outside their own have often inspired artists to push the boundaries of their work. It is equally engaging see a culture that is known and familiar (by heritage, or place of birth) to artists, re-interpreted, contended with, and assimilated into new contexts. Nostalgia, yearnings for that elusive place called home and the immigrant experience in itself becomes the basis for their art.

This is the nerve that the curators at the Queens Museum have touched with their phenomenal exhibition called “Fatal Love- South Asian American Art Now.” The exhibition follows “Crossing the lines” (also featured at the Queens Museum) in 2001, in which artists were asked to create pieces that focused on their particular communities. The museum takes its responsibility to represent the ethnically diverse community that inhabits New York seriously. It makes a fitting venue, therefore, for “Fatal Love,” which is dedicated solely to the creative and cultural engagements of first and second generation American artists of South-Asian descent.

More here.

From Science:

Think all bees look alike? Well we don’t all look alike to them, according to a new study that shows honeybees, who have 0.01% of the neurons that humans do, can recognize and remember individual human faces. For humans, identifying faces is critical to functioning in everyday life. But can animals also tell one face from another? Knowing honeybees’ unusual propensity for distinguishing between different flowers, visual scientist Adrian Dyer of Cambridge University in Cambridge, England, wondered whether that talent stretched to other contexts. So he and his colleagues pinned photographs of four different people’s faces onto a board. By rewarding the bees with a sucrose solution, the team repeatedly coaxed the insects to buzz up to a target face, sometimes varying its location.

Even when the reward was taken away, the bees continued to approach the target face accurately up to 90% of the time, the team reports in the 2 December Journal of Experimental Biology. And in the bees’ brains, the memories stuck: The insects could pick out the target face even two days after being trained.

More here.

From The London Times:

SCIENTISTS ARE, by and large, left-wing creatures. They opposed the Bomb. They generally oppose the destruction of habitats, which aligns them with the green movement. They have, broadly, chosen not to look at whether we are born geniuses or dunces, hippies or murderers; the spectre of genetic determinism conflicts with the cherished liberal notion that we, with the help of parents and society, shape our talents, opportunities and destinies. They believe that scientific research should be conducted for the sake of truth and the benefit of society, rather than to line the pockets of shareholders; this makes them enemies of big business. They tend to believe in evolution, which puts them at odds with the pious. They aspire above all else to objectivity, impartiality and accuracy, and they respect the power of science to overturn old orthodoxies.

Now consider this: public policy on such topics as climate change and stem-cell research requires a scientific input. In America, public policy is moulded by a conservative, industry-friendly, Christian-sympathising Republican Government. The result, Chris Mooney documents in The Republican War on Science, has been an almighty intellectual clash between scientists and politicians. Despite the sometimes crudely partisan line, he weaves a pretty convincing tapestry.

More here.

Joshuah Bearman in LA Weekly:

Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called “ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,” in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the “active listening” psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time. It began:

>>Hello. How do you do.
Please state your problem.

Any typed response elicited a question in return from ELIZA, with key words and phrases substituted and organized in such a way as to sound meaningful and further probing. ELIZA’s mere 200 lines of code, running on the room-size IBM 7094, were effective enough to quickly draw the deepest secrets from many users, including several psychiatric practitioners, who asked if ELIZA could be adapted as a clinical tool; Weizenbaum’s own secretary, who had seen him build the program, knew her interlocutor was not real, and yet still found herself so engaged in personal conversation with the machine that she asked to be alone with it for privacy.

So unfolded a watershed moment in the long history of people and their machines.

More here.