From Haaretz:

“When you first come across it, the concept of “animated documentary” sounds strange, almost an oxymoron. After all, the purpose of a documentary is to capture a fragment of reality and to do so in a way that is as faithful as possible to that reality…

But there has been a surge in the making of documentaries in recent years and a growing realization that a documentary does not capture an objective truth, but rather the way that reality is reflected in the eyes of the director. Decisions such as what to film and what not to film, what angles to employ, how to edit the material and what soundtrack to use affect the portrait of reality presented in the finished film. The successful “Fahrenheit 9/11,” for example, does not offer an objective description of what happened after the terror attacks in the United States; it shows the way in which the director Michael Moore sees things.

If so, then it is possible that animated documentary is not such a wild idea after all. And, indeed, lately there have been an increasing number of films in this genre around the world; animation and documentary film festivals have special categories for it, and even the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, has stipulated in its regulations that an animated documentary can compete in the documentary film category.”

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Sometimes I think the only people writing true Modernist fiction anymore are the Japanese. Why not? They do it well. Here’s a Hiromi Kawakami story from the Paris Review.

The next room is overflowing with humans. My wife and I drop the dead ones down the hole, separate the ones who are going to go back aboveground immediately from those who aren’t, and distribute the gruel.

The humans all look very listless, as if they’re dead. But they aren’t dead. They keep eating away at their surroundings, eating away at themselves; they stay where they are, perfectly motionless —but they don’t die. Here in our hole, unable to become Mogera wogura themselves, as human as ever, they wait for the time when they will be able to go back aboveground.

Some humans die before they are able to go back; then all the others shed tears and writhe about wildly on the floor, and for just a moment their faces, otherwise dead, light up.

From NY Arts magazine.

In 2004, when Romania inaugurated its first-ever National Museum of Contemporary Art in Ceausescu’s nightmarish Peoples Palace, Dumitru Gorzo contributed a large painting depicting the palace on fire while two thugs knife a peasant —a tableau based on a folkloric legend of the Carpathian mountains. Although Gorzo was among many artists displaying both humor and hatred toward everything Ceausescu stood for, his piece provoked the most controversy. Such is the task of the Romanian artist: to attempt fresh creation in a place that for 50 years was aesthetically desecrated and forced into submission before a deadly prole-cultism in art, architecture and art-criticism.

From Scientific American:

The Milky Way may be our own galactic neighborhood, but it still has some surprises in store. To wit: the most comprehensive structural analysis of the galaxy ever conducted indicates that ours is not a run-of-the-mill spiral one after all.

Using NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope to sample light from some 30 million stars in the Milky Way, astronomers observed a long bar of relatively old stars spanning the center of the galaxy.

More here.

From Science:

Some areas of the world, called high background radiation areas (HBRAs), have anomalously high levels of background radiation. In such terrains, the geology and geochemistry of the rocks and minerals have the greatest influence in determining where the high natural radiation shows up. Ramsar, a city in northern Iran, has one of the highest natural-radiation levels in the world. In some locations at Ramsar, the radiation level is 55 to 200 times higher than the background level.

The most interesting feature in all these cases is that the people living in these HBRAs do not appear to suffer any adverse health effects as a result of their high exposures to radiation. On the contrary, in some cases the individuals living in these HBRAs appear to be even healthier and to live longer than those living in control areas that are not classified as HBRAs. These phenomena pose many intriguing questions for medical geologists. Chandra Dissanayake, a senior professor of geology at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, has pioneered geochemical research in Sri Lanka.

More here.

“Sign up and you’re signing away your free time!” That’s just one of the many myths out there about Today’s Military. The reality? 30 days of paid vacation a year is the norm. From salaries to Basic Training, there are lots of misconceptions about military life. Maybe it’s time to familiarize yourself with the truth.
—From Today’s Military, a government Web site.

Joel Stein in The New Yorker:

Dude, we totally know what you’re thinking. That you’ll have to wake up early. That we’ll make you run all day with heavy stuff on your back. That you have to be drug-free, know how to read, and rank the U.S. as one of your top five favorite countries. Wrong, wrong, and wrong! And whatever else you’re thinking? Wrong!

The Army is actually a whole lot of fun. Picture this: You get up—ten, eleven, whatever’s good for you. Then we have brunch. Pancakes, waffles, French toast, some grease if the night before was a rough one. Sugar cereals. Then, at 1200 hours—just kidding! nobody here uses that number thing anymore—around noonish we hit the Xbox for a few hours of Halo and all-you-can-eat Cool Ranch Doritos. It’s combat training without breaking a sweat. After a quick nap, we pack in some more training by watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie marathon. Then a dinner of chipped beef on toast, dehydrated mashed pota- Again, totally joking! We’re having Taco Bell every night, all night, washed down by some of the best that Milwaukee has to offer.

As for uniforms, could that G.I. Joe crap have been any dorkier?

More here.

From The Economist:

The calm unyielding (yet racially and religiously inclusive) leadership of Rudolph Giuliani on September 11th 2001 transformed the mayor of New York into a national hero, dubbed “America’s mayor” by Oprah Winfrey. To the outside world—then, as now, underwhelmed by the president of the explosion-shocked superpower—Mr Giuliani came to symbolise all that was most impressive about America’s response to the terrorist attacks. His heroism during the crisis has made “Sir” Rudy (he was knighted in 2002 by Queen Elizabeth) a potential candidate for the presidency in 2008. Yet it was but the remarkable final act of an eight-year reign in City Hall that required leadership just as heroic in much less obvious ways.

In Fred Siegel’s gripping and persuasive account of that reign, Mr Giuliani mostly comes across as the opposite of the unifying figure standing amid the ruins of the World Trade Centre. According to this modern retelling of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, Mr Giuliani revived a city in seemingly irresistible decline by the determined application of a “corrupt wisdom” that confronted the conventional wisdom propagated by New York’s powerful interest groups (above all, the public-sector unions and Manhattan liberals). Strikingly, Rudy’s favourite aphorism, “I’d rather be respected than loved,” echoed Machiavelli’s “it is better to be feared than loved”.

More here.

“A veteran Vietnam correspondent revisits the romantic retreat where he, and so many others, sought respite from war in Indochina.”

Stanley Karnow in Smithsonian Magazine:

When I was reporting on the Vietnam War for Time, the Washington Post and NBC News, as a respite from the relentless sweat, grime and danger of my assignment, I occasionally flew up to Da Lat, the resort that the French carved out of a misty, pine-covered plateau about 200 miles northeast of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. Apart from a brief clash in 1968, the retreat was hardly affected by the fighting. When I recently returned there, I found that Da Lat still retains much of its old-fashioned charm.

I checked into a meticulously remodeled 1920s luxury hotel, the Sofitel Dalat Palace. The Palace, majestically perched on a crest overlooking placid Xuan Huong Lake, served as my base for exploring the town. Parks and broad avenues are shaded by acacias, cedars, palms and mimosas.

Today, Da Lat’s thriving outdoor market reflects a new prosperity: huge crates overflow with a dazzling array of fruits and vegetables.

Guidebooks publicize the mansion where the country’s last emperor, Bao Dai, dallied with his favorite concubine until he was exiled to the Côte d’Azur in 1955. Not far from the royal mansion lies a mildewed cottage concealed in a bamboo grove: here, at the Stop and Go Café, writers and artists gather to swap ideas and discuss works in progress. Not far away, another landmark, the Han Nga Guesthouse and Art Gallery, embodies a fusion of Surrealism and Dada.

More here.

“In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight’s Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web.”

From the BBC:

Mark Lawson: Because of your invention, I was able to look up every article written by or about you quickly and easily. But at the same time, I was sent several unsolicited links to porn sites. I have to accept that someone in Mexico may have stolen my identity and now be using it. Is the latter absolutely worth paying for the former?

Tim Berners-Lee: That’s an interesting question that you ask, as though it’s a yes or no answer. As though our choice is to turn off the whole thing, or turn on the whole thing. I feel that the web should be something, which basically doesn’t try to coerce people into putting particular sorts of things on it.

I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it, finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don’t like, are problems with humanity.

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it’s communicating over so many other different media. I think it’s a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

More here.

Amanda Mitchison in The Telegraph:

Zaha Hadid, visionary exponent of the crash-landed-and-about-to-explode look in modern architecture and the woman charged with creating an aquatics centre in east London for the 2012 Olympics, has her main offices in a perfectly solid, old, red-brick converted school in Clerkenwell, central London. The surroundings are rather stark: white walls, rows of black files and a series of long tables where her employees – young, thin, brisk worker-bee architects dressed in black – sit behind their laptops.

In contrast Hadid herself, who is also completely clad in black, is large and voluptuous. She regularly works late into the night, her hair looks ruffled and her big, liquid eyes are heavy-lidded. The impression that she has just got out of bed is echoed by the fact that she is wearing a ring decorated with something that looks like a huge diamond-encrusted bedspring.

Wrapped around her torso is an extraordinary garment: a sort of jagged-edged little black duvet with sleeves. Hadid has always dressed adventurously. She once wrote that every garment ‘should be a statement that either questions its form, structure or materiality. I often put on a jacket or a cape upside-down as a means of understanding it in a new way.’

More here.

Mr. Hilton Kramer on the Cézanne/Pissarro exhibit currently showing at MoMA.

To fully understand the exhibition called Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865-1885, which has been organized at the Museum of Modern Art by Joachim Pissarro, the painter’s great-grandson (who is also a MoMA curator), it has to be remembered that the two featured patriarchs of pictorial modernism began their public careers as rejected artists. That is, they were stigmatized as rejected artists by the French government’s annual Salon. But such were the paradoxes of governmental authority in the arts that the French also provided the means for exhibiting these great painters by creating an official Salon des Refusés, which allowed unorthodox talents to be admitted (albeit on a segregated basis) without the approval of an official jury. Thus was born the kind of challenge to established opinion that later came to be called the avant-garde.

More from The New York Observer, here.

The philosopher David Chalmers has created a website compiling the various kinds of zombies that can be found on the web. He’s interested in zombies because of the thought problems they present in terms of philosophy of mind, but he’s liberal minded and inclusive in his approach to zombies of all kinds on this site.

Zombies are hypothetical creatures of the sort that philosophers have been known to cherish. A zombie is physically identical to a normal human being, but completely lacks conscious experience. Zombies look and behave like the conscious beings that we know and love, but “all is dark inside.” There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.

From BBC News:

It is hoped the newly-created cells will eventually help scientists find new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh said the cells should help researchers test the effectiveness of new drugs. Stem cells are “master” cells that can become many kinds of tissue. Nerve stem cells are those which help build the brain and central nervous system. The breakthrough comes three months after scientists at Newcastle University announced they had successfully produced a cloned embryo using donated eggs and genetic material from stem cells. It was the first time a human cloned embryo had been created in Britain.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Juicy gossip moves so quickly – He did what? She has pictures? – that few people have time to cover their ears, even if they wanted to. Gossip has long been dismissed by researchers as little more than background noise, blather with no useful function. But some investigators now say that gossip should be central to any study of group interaction. People find it irresistible for good reason: Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out.

When two or more people huddle to share inside information about another person who is absent, they are often spreading important news, and enacting a mutually protective ritual that may have evolved from early grooming behaviors, some biologists argue.

More here.

Ian Hacking reviews The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind by Steven Rose, in the London Review of Books:

Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly powerful ways of imaging activity in the brain. But he is first of all a biologist. His guiding principle is that we cannot understand the human brain unless we understand how it came into being. He takes as his motto ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ That is the title of a spirited 1973 polemic against creationism by one of the great evolutionary geneticists, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-75).

The maxim suggests two ways of thinking about brains. One is implied directly: start at the beginning of life itself, tracing the appearance of more and more complex living creatures, some of which develop organs that better and better perform brain-like functions. This evolutionary story allows us to begin to understand the constraints governing the structure of complex brains, including our own. The design problems are fascinating: the ways that the different intercommunicating organs within the brain can be made to fit into a skull; which evolutionary paths were followed to end up where we are; and which paths lead to other viable animals. A good deal of the early part of the evolutionary story can be no more than plausible speculation, but whether or not Rose’s speculations are sound, they serve to organise information and understanding in a helpful way.

A second method is implied indirectly by Dobzhansky’s maxim. We should start at the beginning of the life of a human being, and trace the way that an egg becomes a person.

More here.

Lee Smolin in Logos Journal:

For more than two centuries after Newton published his theories of space, time, and motion in 1687, most physicists were Newtonians. They believed, as Newton did, that space and time are absolute, that force causes acceleration, and that gravity is a force conveyed across a vacuum at a distance. Since Darwin there are few professional biologists who are not Darwinians, and if most psychologists no longer often call themselves Freudians, few doubt that there is an unconscious or that sexuality plays a big role in it. So as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s great discoveries, the question arises: How many professional physicists are Einsteinians?

The superficial answer is that we all are. No professional physicist today doubts that quantum theory and relativity theory have stood up to experimental tests. But the term “Einsteinian” does not exist. I’ve never heard or read it. Nor have I ever encountered any evidence for a “school of Einstein.” There is a community of people scattered around the world who call themselves relativists, whose main scientific work centers on general relativity. But relativists make up only a tiny minority of theoretical physicists, and there is no country where they dominate the intellectual atmosphere of the field.

Strange as it may seem, Albert Einstein, the discoverer of both quantum and relativity theory, and hence clearly the preeminent physicist of the modern era, failed to leave behind a following with any appreciable influence. Why most physicists followed other leaders in directions Einstein opposed is a story that must be told if this centennial year is to be other than an empty celebration of a myth, unconnected to the reality of who Einstein was and what he believed in.

More here.

Hua Hsu in The Boston Globe:

The most fascinating aspect of hoaxes is the extent to which they tend to escape the control of their creators, absorbing new accomplices along the way. As McHale observed in a recent interview, literary hoaxes are ”cut loose from their source, or outright lie about it, and so float free, in a certain sense, so that they can be reclaimed further down the line and used for all sorts of unintended purposes.”

But not all hoaxes are created equal, and McHale cautions against seeing them all through the same moral lens. He identifies three types, each with their own ethical consequences: ”genuine hoaxes,” ”entrapment hoaxes,” and ”mock-hoaxes.”

Genuine hoaxes are those that are unleashed with no hope of ever being exposed: These are the literary equivalents of forged paintings. In 1764, Horace Walpole published ”The Castle of Otranto” under the pretense that it was a recently discovered 16th-century manuscript recounting a story that dated back to the Crusades. Walpole was exposed as its author and forced to apologize, though ”Otranto” endures as a seminal moment of Gothic literature.

More here.

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

How did we-not just Americans but human beings in general—come to be? Opinions differ, but for most of recorded history the consensus view was that people were made out of mud. Also, that the mud was originally turned into people by a being or beings who themselves resembled people, only bigger, more powerful, and longer-lived, often immortal. The early Chinese theorized that a lonely goddess, pining for company, used yellow mud to fashion the first humans. According to the ancient Greeks, Prometheus sculpted the first man from mud, after which Athena breathed life into him. Mud is the man-making material in the creation stories of Mesopotamian city-states, African tribes, and American Indian nations.

The mud theory is still dominant in the United States, in the form of the Book of Genesis, whose version of the origin of our species, according to a recent Gallup poll, is deemed true by forty-five per cent of the American public.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Having run out of sheep the other night, I found myself counting the ways to flip a mattress. Earlier that day I had flipped the very mattress on which I was not sleeping, and the chore had left a residue of puzzled discontent. If you’re going to bother at all with such a fussbudget bit of housekeeping, it seems like you ought to do it right, rotating the mattress to a different position each time, so as to pound down the lumps and fill in the sags on all the various surfaces. The trouble is, in the long interval between flips I always forget which way I flipped it last time. Lying awake that night, I was turning the problem over in my head, searching for a golden rule of mattress flipping…

To make sense of all this turning and flipping, the first thing we need is some clear notation. A mattress can be rotated around any of three orthogonal axes. I could label the axes x, y and z, but I’d just forget which is which, so it seems better to adopt the terminology of aviation. If you think of a mattress as an airplane flying toward the headboard of the bed, then the three axes are designated roll, pitch and yaw as shown in the illustration to the right. The roll axis is parallel to the longest dimension of the mattress, the pitch axis runs along the next-longest dimension, and the yaw axis passes through the shortest dimension.

More here.

From Slate:

Any citizen has the right to petition the president for redress of grievance, or for that matter to insult him to his face. But the potential number of such people is very large, and you don’t have the right to cut in line by having so much free time that you can set up camp near his drive. Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive’s ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders. Most presidents in time of war have made an exception in the case of the bereaved—Lincoln’s letter to the mother of two dead Union soldiers (at the time, it was thought that she had lost five sons) is a famous instance—but the job there is one of comfort and reassurance, and this has already been discharged in the Sheehan case. If that stricken mother had been given an audience and had risen up to say that Lincoln had broken his past election pledges and sought a wider and more violent war with the Confederacy, his aides would have been quite right to show her the door and to tell her that she was out of order.

More here.