From The Guardian:

He was born, obscurely, Samuel Clemens in 1835, the year Halley’s comet appeared in the Victorian skies. When, as Mark Twain, he died in 1910, the comet was once again describing a fiery track through the heavens, and he was now more famous than any American writer had ever been.

As Ron Powers puts it in his exhilarating new biography: ‘His way of seeing and hearing things changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things … he was the Lincoln of American literature.’

‘Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.’

‘If you must gamble your lives sexually, don’t play a lone hand too much.’

‘Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.’

‘Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.’

‘It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and the prudence never to practise either.’

More here.

From The New York Times:

“PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor,” the writer Malcolm Gladwell said recently. “People who are busy doing things — as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops — don’t have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.” Slight, shoeless and sporting the large head of curly hair that’s become his trademark, Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was sitting at the kitchen table of his apartment in a West Village town house. In tones at once laid-back and precise, he was discussing his best-selling books: “The Tipping Point” argues that small actions can spark “social epidemics” — a term he gives a positive connotation; and “Blink” a paean to intuitive thinking, makes a case for “thin-slicing,” paring down our information intake so we can tune out the static and make fast, sound decisions. Gladwell said his goal in those two books was simple: In a culture with too much information and not enough time, he offers “organizing structures” for people’s lives.

Their success has given Gladwell an active, and extremely lucrative, second career as a public speaker. Much in demand, he is paid in the neighborhood of $40,000 per lecture. He’s also on the recommended reading list at many companies and business schools, and has spoken at West Point and the National Institutes of Health, among many other institutions. Last year, Time magazine named him one of its “100 most influential people.” Fast Company magazine called Gladwell “a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud.” Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of multiple-thread narrative movies like “Traffic” and “Syriana,” is developing a movie based on “Blink.” That book is also the subject of a clever sendup, “Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All,” by the pseudonymous Noah Tall, which will be out this month.

More here.

In the BBC, a modest proposal to reduce carbon dioxide emission and a related website.

Listening to most politicians, you would think the world’s energy problems can be solved only by building ever bigger power stations and burning ever more fuel.

Not so; and it certainly cannot solve the coming climate crisis.

After turning off unnecessary pieces of equipment, improved energy efficiency is the cheapest way for developing countries to maximise their use of limited energy supplies, and for developed countries to achieve cuts in their carbon dioxide emissions.

One quick and simple option for improving energy efficiency would be to make greater use of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Each one of these bulbs produces the same amount of light as an incandescent light bulb whilst being responsible for the emission of 70% less carbon dioxide.

It also saves money; about £7 ($12) per year in the UK, more or less in other countries depending on electricity prices.

So why not just ban incandescent bulbs – why not make them illegal?

They waste so much energy that if they were invented today, it is highly unlikely they would be allowed onto the market.

Nobody would suffer; every energy-saving bulb would save money and help to curb climate change.

From Nature:

A strange, sleek bird will take to the skies this month in an attempt to fly further than any aircraft before it. The plane, called the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, last soared into the record books in March 2005, when aviator Steve Fossett successfully piloted it on the first solo, non-stop flight around the world. For Fossett and his team, though, the world is not enough. They plan to go one better: to take off from the United States, circle the globe eastwards and then cross the Atlantic a second time. They are awaiting a good window of weather, which could come as early as 7 February.

While the plane is a feat of engineering, Fossett’s new trip won’t pioneer or test any new technologies. Instead, the main challenge will be one of human endurance, says aeronautics curator Robert van der Linden of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Fossett will have to stay alert for roughly 80 hours. He plans to live on milkshakes, presumably since they are convenient, high on energy and low on toilet demands. “It’s a great testament to him as a pilot,” van der Linden says. Researchers have found that people show problems performing simple tasks after 24 hours without sleep, and the situation only gets worse the longer they stay awake. After 48 hours without shuteye, people tend to fall rapidly asleep even if they are trying to stay awake, says Kenneth Wright who studies sleep at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Adrenaline will certainly be helpful – but it might not be enough,” he says. On his first round-the-world flight, Fossett planned to take 30-minute power naps, but it was reported that he only ever grabbed a few minutes kip between looking at the controls.

More here.

From BBC News:

Oetzi, the prehistoric man frozen in a glacier for 5,300 years, could have been infertile, a new study suggests. Genetic research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, also confirms that his roots probably lie in Central Europe. Oetzi’s body was found in the melting ice of the Schnalstal glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991. Examination of his remains has already revealed the Copper Age man almost certainly died as a result of a fight. The assessment is based on the presence of an arrowhead that is lodged in his back and extensive cuts to his hands. The scientists behind the latest genetic research now speculate that Oetzi’s possible sterility could have been a factor that led to this violent end.

More here.

More here.  And also see this previous 3QD post for more details about Flux.  If you are in the NYC area this evening, come to this!

Opinion piece from Spiegel:

Best-selling author and Muslim dissident Ibn Warraq argues that freedom of expression is our western heritage and we must defend it against attacks from totalitarian societies. If the west does not stand in solidarity with the Danish, he argues, then the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest:

Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples.

On the world stage, should we really apologize for Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe? Mozart, Beethoven and Bach? Rembrandt, Vermeer,  Van Gogh, Breughel, Ter Borch? Galileo, Huygens, Copernicus, Newton and Darwin? Penicillin and computers? The Olympic Games and Football? Human rights and parliamentary democracy? The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. No, the west needs no lectures on the superior virtue of societies who keep their women in subjection, cut off their clitorises, stone them to death for alleged adultery, throw acid on their faces, or deny the human rights of those considered to belong to lower castes.

More here.

Seymour Mauskopf reviews biographies of Priestly and Lavoisier in American Scientist:

The story of the chemical revolution that took place at the end of the 18th century is one of the most compelling in the history of science. Nearly 60 years ago, this narrative was given particular dramatic force by James Bryant Conant in a case study titled The Overthrow of the Phlogiston Theory. In 1962, Conant’s formulation achieved iconic status in Thomas S. Kuhn’s seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, like Conant, shaped his account as a duel between two heroic scientific protagonists, Joseph Priestley and Antoine Laurent Lavoisier.

The drama was heightened by the fact that Priestley, the apostle of the phlogiston theory, had discovered a gas that promoted combustion and respiration far better than ordinary air. He had named it dephlogisticated air (more on this later). This same gas, about which Lavoisier had learned from Priestley, became the centerpiece of Lavoisier’s new antiphlogistic theory and was given a new name by him: le principe oxygine (“acid maker”). The fact that we still call the gas oxygen and find dephlogisticated air an obsolete and mystifying name shows clearly who was the victor in this intellectual battle.

More here.

Negar Azimi in Slate:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fiery brand of rhetoric and his curious disdain for diplomacy are a gift to Iran’s critics. He has famously denied the Holocaust and asked why the state of Israel could not be moved to Europe or North America. Back home, however, his pronouncements are unremarkable. Such talk is standard fare in official Iranian circles—as is mandated lip service to the fate of the underdog Palestinians. In fact, the president’s comments hardly merited mention in most Iranian papers—despite the hysteria they sparked in editorial pages throughout the West.

More here.

PZ Myers in Pharyngula:

Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it’s really happening. Of course, it isn’t with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it’s the topic of ongoing debate. Let’s consider one recent example of such an experiment.

Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It’s also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

More here.  [Thanks to Carl Shapiro.]

From Butterflies and Wheels (via One Good Move):

But toleration, which is often, although not always, a good thing, is not the same as relativism, which is never a good thing; and it is vital to understand the difference. In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion: in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force. The first great champion of toleration in this sense was John Locke, and his successors included not only famous liberals such as John Stuart Mill, but men with a rather more direct impact on human affairs, such as Thomas Jefferson. Toleration entered political life with the Enlightenment. It is a characteristically secular virtue: there has never been and never will be a theocracy that can wholeheartedly applaud it. For the religious mind, many sayings are not to be assessed at the bar of truth or falsity, but at that of blasphemy, and to hold that a person blasphemes is to hold that that person’s sayings at least, and the person for preference, must be suppressed.

Toleration gives us the dictum attributed to Voltaire, that I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Relativism, by contrast, chips away at our right to disapprove of what anybody says. Relativism names a loose cluster of attitudes, but the central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth. There are two relativistic mantras: “Who is to say?” (who is to say which opinion is better?) and “That’s just your opinion” (your opinion is on all fours with any other). There are only different views, each true “for” those who hold them. Relativism in this sense goes beyond counselling that we must try to understand those whose opinions are different. It is not only that we must try to understand them, but also that we must recognize a symmetry of standing. Their opinions “deserve the same respect” as our own. So, at the limit, we may have western values, but they have others; we have a western view of the universe, they have theirs; we have western science, they have traditional science; and so on.

There have been many philosophical attempts to refute relativism, beginning perhaps with Plato’s encounter with sophists such as Gorgias or opponents such as Theodorus in the Theaetetus. Theodorus defends Protagoras’s doctrine that Man is the Measure of All Things, which Socrates takes to imply relativism. The central tactic Socrates uses is to query whether the relativistic doctrine applies to itself. If it does not, then it seems that there is at least one non-relative, absolute truth. If it does, then indeed relativism may be true for Protagoras, but remains untrue for Socrates and the rest of us who agree with him.

More here.

From CNN:

A senior United Nations aid official called on Thursday for a halt to arms sales to Africa, saying it would be more effective in addressing the continent’s poverty than charity rock concerts or debt relief.

Dennis McNamara, special U.N. adviser on internal displacement, slammed world powers for neglecting some 12.5 million Africans uprooted within their countries, who form half of the world’s internally displaced persons (IDPs).

He accused the West of supplying the weapons fuelling African conflicts which leave civilians homeless — and prey to war crimes, hunger, disease and rape — while greedy companies exploit the oil and mineral wealth.

“Guns are at the heart of the problem … There is one slogan I would like to suggest for 2006: No Arms Sales to Africa. Zero. Not an embargo, not a sanction, a voluntary cessation of all arms sales to Africa,” McNamara told a news briefing.

“The kids on the streets of Nairobi, Khartoum, Abidjan and Monrovia have guns in their pockets or up their sleeves … We provided the arms. We the West, we the G8,” he added, referring to the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

More here.

James C. McKinley, Jr. in the New York Times:

The cafeteria of the alternative medicine clinic where Coretta Scott King died this week was full of true believers on Wednesday afternoon, all swearing by the anticancer treatments of a man who never went to medical school and has a long history of fraud allegations against him in the United States.

That man, the hospital’s founder, Kurt W. Donsbach, was presiding in the brightly lighted room, asking for testimonials from his patients. Several said their doctors in the United States had told them to go home and wait to die. Then they came to the clinic and discovered that Mr. Donsbach’s treatments worked.

More here.  And there’s also this: “When Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void” by Benedict Carey, also in the New York Times:

The most telling evidence of Americans’ dissatisfaction with traditional health care is the more than $27 billion they spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine, according to government estimates. In ways large and small, millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the mainstream, whether by taking the herbal remedy echinacea for a cold or by placing their last hopes for cancer cure in alternative treatment, as did Coretta Scott King, who died this week at an alternative hospice clinic in Mexico.

They do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work. Nor do they seem to mind that alternative therapy practitioners have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do or that vitamin and herb makers are as profit-driven as drug makers.

This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Review of Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, in the New York Review of Books:

Despite having the tag “magic realist” attached to him, García Márquez works very much in the tradition of psychological realism, with its premise that the workings of the individual psyche have a logic that is capable of being tracked. He himself has remarked that his so-called magic realism is simply a matter of telling hard-to-believe stories with a straight face, a trick he learned from his grandmother in Cartagena; furthermore, that what outsiders find hard to believe in his stories is often commonplace Latin American reality. Whether we find this plea disingenuous or not, the fact is that the mixing of the fantastical and the real—or, to be more precise, the elision of the either-or holding “fantasy” and “reality” apart—that caused such a stir when One Hundred Years of Solitude came out in 1967 has become commonplace in the novel well beyond the borders of Latin America.

Is the cat in Memories of My Melancholy Whores just a cat or is it a visitor from the underworld? Does Delgadina come to her lover’s aid on the night of the storm, or does he, under the spell of love, merely imagine her visit? Is this sleeping beauty just a working-class girl earning a few pesos on the side, or is she a creature from another realm where princesses dance all night and fairy helpers perform superhuman labors and maidens are put to sleep by enchantresses? To demand unequivocal answers to questions like these is to mistake the nature of the storyteller’s art. Roman Jakobson liked to remind us of the formula used by traditional storytellers in Majorca as a preamble to their performances: It was and it was not so.

More here.  [Coetzee in photo.]

Berj A. Doudian writes in to Cecil at The Straight Dope:

Please, please, please settle this question. The discussion has been going on for ages, and any time someone mentions the words “airplane” or “conveyor belt” everyone starts right back up. Here’s the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed [relative to the still ground next to the runway] and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”

Answer here.

Joe Rao in Space.com:

The planet Venus has returned to the early morning sky and has established itself as a dazzling morning lantern, emerging into view from beyond the east-southeast horizon before 5:00 a.m. local standard time. 

Just three weeks ago, on Jan. 13, was the day of its inferior conjunction – when it passed between the Sun and Earth and made its transition from an evening to a morning object. 

A week later it had moved far enough away from the Sun’s vicinity so that it was rising more than an hour before sunrise. Bill Bogardus, a member of New York’s Amateur Observers’ Society (http://www.aosny.org/) was one of the first to catch sight of it early on Saturday morning, Jan. 21:

“I got up to answer the call of nature a little after 6 a.m. and looked out my southeast window to the approaching dawn.  In the twilight, I spotted a bright object just a few degrees above the horizon. My guess was that it was Venus appearing on its eastward rise, which it turned out to be.”

And now Venus is much easier to sight, rising more than two hours before the Sun.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach’s mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.

More here.

Also in the LRB, a review of a new biogrpahy of Anthony Burgess.

There is an awkward period in the lives of clothes, furniture and writers, when they become something more than dated but something less than a piece of history. We call things that have reached this state ‘unfashionable’, and usually throw such stuff away without thinking any more about it. Everyone sees a 1960s sideboard or a 1980s haircut as dated, and, beyond an embarrassed smile at our folly for ever having admired such cheesy horrors, these things rarely give rise to any thought. But unfashionable things are much more complicated and intriguing phenomena than they might appear. They open a gap in our ways of perceiving because they fall between our aesthetic and our historical sense. When we look at unfashionable objects our senses tell us that an age has passed, but we don’t yet have a means of giving those things the benefit of a historical perspective. The unfashionable embarrasses us – how can I have worn that? – but when the first blush is over it should challenge us to think about how our tastes are made and why they change.

Anthony Burgess is a 1960s sideboard of a writer. His range was improbable. He published 32 novels, composed symphonies, wrote two books on Joyce, a biography of Shakespeare and a study of the English language, as well as a large number of film scripts, most of which never entered production. He died in 1993, and is at the moment passing through the droop in reputation which most dead writers endure before they can become history. Four years ago he was the victim of what was generally regarded as a loathsome biography by Roger Lewis, who presented him as a pompous, psychologically damaged second-rater. Lewis’s biography was no fun to read, but it was interesting for what it revealed about responses to the unfashionable. It was written by a lapsed admirer, and showed exactly what happens when a reader realises that he no longer likes what he thought he liked, but hasn’t yet worked out how to detach himself from his former feeling. The result is rage and loathing, which is chiefly a warped form of embarrassment about one’s former admiration.

In the London Review of Book, Malcolm Bull looks at two new studies of genocide, one by Michael Mann and the other by Mark Levene.

Reasoned defences of most genocides can be constructed on the basis of a conjunction of the just war and social exclusion arguments, for if there is an identifiable social group engaged in total war against you, then it has to be neutralised. The Armenian genocide in 1915 was justified on these grounds, for the Armenians were expected to fight with the Russians in the event of an invasion of Anatolia. Stalin’s classicide was an attempt to deal with counter-revolutionary elements who might have sided with the Whites in the event of a renewed civil war or foreign invasion. A defence of the Holocaust might be constructed along the same lines: the attack on Bolshevism was a just war against an outlaw state ‘driven by slavery and the threat of human sacrifice’; it became a total war in which Jews would probably have taken the Soviet side; their pre-emptive internment was therefore a natural precaution, and their execution an unfortunate necessity at a time of ‘supreme emergency’ when the Red Army threatened the Fatherland. If you accept the just war and social exclusion arguments, then these genocides can only be criticised on the basis that they relied on shaky political analysis. They were, in effect, misjudgments, failures of statesmanship, perhaps.

These are not hypothetical arguments. Orhan Pamuk was until recently awaiting trial for affirming the existence of an Armenian genocide, while the president of Iran has cast doubt on the Holocaust, and floated the idea of relocating the state of Israel in Central Europe. Mann and Levene both see genocide as a modern practice coextensive with the rise of the West, and imply that the Middle East has been relatively insulated from this historical pattern. But as war and democracy march hand in hand into the region, that may change. On Mann’s analysis, the chances of some sort of genocide must be quite high. According to him, murderous ethnic cleansing takes place where the demos is equated with the ethnos. Young democracies are particularly at risk, especially those where ethnicity trumps class as the primary means of social classification. The danger zone is reached when two groups claim the same territory, and they reach the brink either when the weaker group fights rather than submits (perhaps believing it has outside support) or when the stronger thinks it can act with impunity. Genocides do not occur in stable, peaceful environments, but at moments of crisis when the state is in danger. So societies only go over the brink when the perpetrators of the genocide are radicalised by war.

Your most recent book is titled 100 Essential Modern Poems. Why are the hundred poems in this anthology essential?

Well, first of all, I should say that they are not THE one hundred essential modern poems. These poems had something to say, rather than just being experiments in style and technique. They address certain perennial issues such as life, death, love, heartbreak, war, and peace, but from a distinctly modern point of view.

I do not necessarily define these poems as modern in the Modernist sense, which is to say that period of High Modernism in the 1920’s which included people like Stevens, Marianne Moore, etc. The modern innovation shook up the stagnant period of poetry preceding their own, which can be termed genteel poetry. The modern world brought fundamental changes in how people lived. The biggest event that defined the modern era was, of course, World War I. This served to sweep into the ashcan pieties about what made the world go around. This new notion of personal isolation brought about from this cataclysmic event inspired a poetry centered around being on one’s own. Also, there was a focus on concrete reality, what things really are, becoming the prevailing interest carried to the fore by these poets. The central idea was not for poetry to take one to a higher realm, but rather to bring poetry back down to earth.

more from bookslut.com here.