John Ezard in The Guardian:

A newly found poem by Sappho, acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of Greek classical antiquity and seen by some as the finest of any era, is published for the first time today.

Written more than 2,600 years ago, the 101 words of verse deal with a theme timeless in both art and soap operas; the stirrings of an ageing body towards the nimbleness, youth and love it once knew.

The poem is the rarest of discoveries. Sappho’s pre-eminent reputation as an artist of lyricism and love is based on only three complete poems, 63 complete single lines and up to 264 fragments.

These are all that have survived of the writings of a woman who the Greek philosopher Plato said should be honoured not merely as a great lyric poet but as one of the Muses, the goddesses who inspire all art.

More here.

Arthur Kempton in the New York Review of Books:

In the spring of 1947, Jimmy Fletcher heard from his bosses at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that it might be a convenient time to visit Billie Holiday at home. Her manager, a former fight-fixer, whoremonger, and running dog in Al Capone’s pack, had offered up the celebrated Negro “torchchanteuse” and notorious dope fiend as grist for Harry Anslinger’s publicity mill.

Anslinger, the bureau’s first and only commissioner, was the public face of America’s war on drugs, and he hustled as hard, if not as well, as his envied rival J. Edgar Hoover. Splashy arrests kept the congressional purse holders mindful of who stood between America’s schoolchildren and the ravening scourge of narcotics. For doers of the commissioner’s bidding, Billie Holiday was “an attractive customer,” a reliable source of repeat business.

More here.

From CNN:

The American Psychiatric Association on Monday sharply criticized actor Tom Cruise for televised remarks in which he called psychiatry a “pseudo science” and disputed the value of antidepressant drugs…

“Before I was a Scientologist, I never agreed with psychiatry,” Cruise said. “And when I started studying the history of psychiatry, I understood more and more why I didn’t believe in psychology. … And I know that psychiatry is a pseudo science.” (Full story)

Disputing the effectiveness of antidepressants generally, Cruise said, “all it does is mask the problem.” He added, “There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.”

Cruise also singled out drugs, such as Ritalin, that are used to treat children for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, calling Ritalin “a street drug.”

As “Today” host Matt Lauer pressed the 42-year-old actor on his views, Cruise said, “Here’s the problem. You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”

More here.

Mark Trodden in a post at Orange Quark:

At the risk of being pedantic (Oh, who am I kidding, I’m going to go on and on about this stuff until it stops), the attack on science in the U.S. is going ahead full steam. Congressman Joe Barton (Republican, of Texas), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is sending intimidating letters to the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and to Arden Bement, Director of the National Science Foundation. It’s true – take a look! Chris Mooney has some excerpts from the letters, so I won’t reproduce them here, but will just comment that they are of a kind designed to make scientists think twice about undertaking research on such a politically sensitive topic as global warming.

Representative Barton’s tactics are just part of the more wide-ranging assault on scientific evidence that the Bush administration is waging.

More here.  Mark also has other posts on the anti-science activities of the Bush administration.

From Scientific American:

As its 19th-century name suggests–and as many people know from the educational efforts of prominent Parkinson’s sufferers such as Janet Reno, Muhammad Ali and Michael J. Fox–the disease is characterized by movement disorders. Tremor in the hands, arms and elsewhere, limb rigidity, slowness of movement, and impaired balance and coordination are among the disease’s hallmarks. In addition, some patients have trouble walking, talking, sleeping, urinating and performing sexually.

These impairments result from neurons dying. Because the insights involve molecules whose activity could potentially be altered or mimicked by drugs in ways that would limit cell death, the discoveries could lead to therapies that would do more than ease symptoms–they would actually limit the neuronal degeneration responsible for disease progression. 

More here.

From The New York Times:

There was a conference for time travelers at M.I.T. earlier this spring. I’m still hoping to attend, and although the odds are slim, they are apparently not zero despite the efforts and hopes of deterministically minded physicists who would like to eliminate the possibility of your creating a paradox by going back in time and killing your grandfather.

More here.

“If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would not have been written. If the EU applies it to software, every computer user will be restricted, says Richard Stallman.”

Richard Stallman in The Guardian:

A novel and a modern complex programme have certain points in common: each is large and implements many ideas. Suppose patent law had been applied to novels in the 1800s; suppose states such as France had permitted the patenting of literary ideas. How would this have affected Hugo’s writing? How would the effects of literary patents compare with the effects of literary copyright?

Consider the novel Les Misérables, written by Hugo. Because he wrote it, the copyright belonged only to him. He did not have to fear that some stranger could sue him for copyright infringement and win. That was impossible, because copyright covers only the details of a work of authorship, and only restricts copying. Hugo had not copied Les Misérables, so he was not in danger.

Patents work differently. They cover ideas – each patent is a monopoly on practising some idea, which is described in the patent itself.

More here.

“NASA scientists have planned a spectacular celestial show for July 4th. That’s the date on which a probe from the Deep Impact spacecraft is scheduled to slam into the comet Tempel 1 in an attempt to learn more about the comet’s billion-year-old interior. New images snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope are giving researchers a sneak peak at what type of conditions they might find. The pictures show a new jet of dust streaming out of the icy comet.”

more here.

“In no Western country were questions of sexuality more politically central during the second
half of the twentieth century than the Federal Republic of Germany. after the collapse of National Socialism it was, in the slang of the time, Thema 1 (“Topic No. 1″); by 1970 the Nouvel Observateur could claim that the Germans were sex-obsessed—”Sex über alles“—noting that the heavy breathing of orgasm had mercifully replaced the stomping of boots. Nowhere were sexual and political liberation linked more fiercely during the 1960s and ’70s, and nowhere—with the possible exception of the United States—was the backlash in the decades that followed more painful. Even in the German Democratic Republic, where socialism supposedly made matters of personal sexual morality less pressing, Siegfried Schnabl’s 1969 Mann und Frau intim (Man and Woman Intimately) was the biggest-selling title of any book in East German history (the nearest competitor was a book on gardening).”

More from Bookforum.

From Nature:

A computer model has made progress in solving an astronomical mystery: why is so much hydrogen in the Universe paired up into molecules instead of existing as single atoms? The secret is simple. It comes down to the fact that space dust is probably bumpy rather than smooth. It has long been assumed that hydrogen atoms sticking to these dust particles are jostled together, encouraging hydrogen atoms to pair up into H₂. But when one team of researchers tested this theory, it came up short.

More here.

From American Scientist:

With their magnificent architecture and sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, the Maya boasted one of the great cultures of the ancient world. Although they had not discovered the wheel and were without metal tools, the Maya constructed massive pyramids, temples and monuments of hewn stone both in large cities and in smaller ceremonial centers throughout the lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, which covers parts of what are now southern Mexico and Guatemala and essentially all of Belize. From celestial observatories, such as the one at Chichén Itzá, they tracked the progress of Venus and developed a calendar based on a solar year of 365 days. They created their own system of mathematics, using a base number of 20 with a concept of zero. And they developed a hieroglyphic scheme for writing, one that used hundreds of elaborate signs. The demise of Maya civilization (which archaeologists call “the terminal Classic collapse”) has been one of the great anthropological mysteries of modern times. What could have happened?

More here.

Edward Gunts in the Baltimore Sun:

With 82,000 square feet of space on five levels, the Lewis museum is the second-largest African-American heritage museum in the United States, after Detroit’s. At its heart are permanent and temporary exhibits that tell stories about African-Americans in Maryland – the obstacles they’ve overcome and the contributions they’ve made. There are also gathering spaces for conferences and receptions, an auditorium, cafe, interactive learning center, oral history recording center, staff offices, classrooms and a store.

The land finally chosen for the museum is a corner parcel within easy walking distance of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the state’s most-visited tourist district. The architects’ challenge was to create a building that fits into the urban context but stands out enough to convey how unusual it is.

They responded with a boldly modern building that makes the most of its tight but prominent site. Then they imbued the building with layers of meaning that help tell what’s inside. The design doesn’t make literal references to African architecture. Its strength lies in the use of architectural symbolism – through colors, forms and materials – to create a building that avoids cliches but is undeniably African-American in spirit.

More here.

An interesting assessment from a man not usually considered particularly Left Wing.

NO ONE EVER THOUGHT IT would be easy to conquer the outposts of tyranny or to destroy the sponsors of terror. But it shouldn’t be that hard, most of the time, to hold American foreign policy to some minimum standards: no rewards for gross acts of dictatorial oppression; no blind eye to facilitation of terrorism; no benign neglect for nuclear proliferation; no free passes for aiders and abettors of tyrants. Are we meeting those standards?

Not as much as we should be, and not as much as we could be.

And as an extra-special Sunday bonus here at 3Quarks, here are a couple of pictures of Mr. Kristol getting pied at Earlham College.

“In 1666 Isaac Newton took a glass prism and separated sunlight into its constituent colours. In so doing he disproved Aristotle’s contention that all colour was a mixture of black and white, invented the modern notion of the colour spectrum, and showed what rainbows are made of. Four hundred years later French artist Yves Klein was still airily proclaiming that “colour is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state”. This doesn’t say great things for art.”

More here.

From Science:

Seen through the lens of popular culture, the future often seems like a time disconnected from the present. The view tends toward strange and dystopic—think 1984 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and The Matrix. But when AAAS convened nearly three dozen top thinkers in science and technology policy to contemplate the year 2033, the perspective was strikingly different. The future, as they saw it, is familiar; many of the perils likely to confront humanity then are already evident today. While there are ominous portents in climate change, mutating viruses and emerging technologies for body and brain enhancement, they agreed that scientists, engineers and policy-makers can limit or prevent future problems—if they begin acting now.

One of the overarching themes of Vision 2033 is that technology will become more subtle and more powerful, reaching deeper into daily life.

More here.

Dyson reviews Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, in the New York Review of Books:

At age eleven, Leo enrolled Norbert as a student at Tufts University, where he graduated with a degree in mathematics at age fourteen. Norbert then moved to Harvard as a graduate student and emerged with a Ph.D. in mathematical logic at age eighteen. While he was growing up and trying to escape from his notoriety as a prodigy at Tufts and Harvard, Leo was making matters worse by trumpeting Norbert’s accomplishments in newspapers and popular magazines. Leo was emphatic in claiming that his son was not unusually gifted, that any advantage that Norbert had gained over other children was due to his better training. “When this was written down in ineffaceable printer’s ink,” said Norbert in his autobiography, Ex-prodigy, “it declared to the public that my failures were my own but my successes were my father’s.”

More here.

Rebecca Maksel reviews The Geneticist Who Played Hoops With My DNA And Other Masterminds From the Frontiers of Biotech by David Ewing Duncan, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The legend of the chimera (a creature said to bear the head of a lion and the body of a goat, with a dragon’s tail tacked on) has long fascinated humans. Its modern-day equivalent — organisms composed of two or more genetically distinct tissues — captivates conservatives and liberals alike. In his new book, “The Geneticist Who Play Hoops with My DNA,” Duncan profiles seven scientists on the cutting edge of biotechnology, today’s most controversial science.

Duncan, who has written on such diverse topics as the development of the Gregorian calendar and the history of Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto, turns his discerning eye toward the role of personality in science, concluding that individual scientists — and their reputations — are driving the current era of biological discovery as much as the knowledge itself.

And the scientists profiled are an unruly lot, some motivated as much by thoughts of fame as by the desire for knowledge.

More here.

“Julian Barnes’s wonderfully executed Arthur & George recounts Conan Doyle’s own detective adventure.”

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

Julian Barnes has always fancied a detective yarn. In the 1980s, he used to have a go at them himself, under the pseudonym of Dan Kavanagh, who wrote calculatedly hard-boiled tales about Duffy, a bisexual ex-cop on the trail of vice and murder in Soho. At the time, Barnes used to explain this sideline by saying it came from a different part of his head from the grown-up cleverness of Flaubert’s Parrot or A History of the World in 10½ Chapters; it was a holiday job.

For Arthur & George, you might say that the author has combined for the first time those two halves of his brain, taken his rigour on vacation. With characteristically engaging intelligence, he has climbed into the mind of the most celebrated detective writer of all, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and set off on an adventure.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Disguises used by female damselflies to avoid unwanted sexual advances can cause males to seek out their own sex, a new study suggests. Belgian researchers investigated why male damselflies often try to mate with each other. The scientists say the reason could lie with females that adopt a range of appearances to throw potential mates off their scent. In an evolutionary battle of the sexes, males become attracted to a range of different looks, with some actually preferring a more masculine appearance.

More here.

From The New York Times:

BY the time he died in 1977, expiring at the age of 60 in the back seat of a taxi on his way into New York City from Kennedy Airport, Robert Lowell had turned himself inside out in literature. Socially well connected and classically educated, with the bearing and voice of a disheveled senator, the highborn Bostonian wasn’t well and hadn’t been for years, but despite an exhausting life of marital blowups, manic-depressive breakdowns, political controversy and punishing hard work, he’d managed to invent along the way what came to be known as confessional poetry, a sort of orderly bleeding onto the page that in Lowell’s case combined erudition, anguish and mundane detail for an effect of aching, lurid uplift. The poems of his later, most distinctive period, which began with the publication of ”Life Studies” in 1959, inspired a long dominant mode whose best-known practitioners included two of his students, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Lowell’s poems proved that if writing is a form of therapy, it’s a uniquely unsuccessful one, at least in medical terms, and that insights into the larger human predicament don’t guarantee their author a good night’s sleep, a stable marriage or a dignified passing. Winning Pulitzer Prizes and the like is no balm either. Nothing (even lithium, it seemed) could halt Lowell’s slide into miserable ill health and psychological chaos.

More here.