David Dudley in Cornell Alumni Magazine:

If you’re looking for architectural anxiety, Eisenman is your man. Since his arrival on the stage in the 1960s as one of a league of loosely affiliated American followers of Le Corbusier known as the “New York Five” (the others were Meier, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and John Hedjuk), Eisenman has been all but synonymous with a heady theory-driven audacity that tends to leave both admirers and critics baffled. He designed a deviously unlivable house based on the linguistic principles of Noam Chomsky, collaborated with Jacques Derrida in an effort to find an architectural equivalent to the French philosopher’s theory of deconstruction, and generally pushed the practical envelope of what the discipline was capable of. “Peter had a lot to do with turning architecture into an intellectual pursuit,” says his friend Phyllis Bronfman Lambert ’48, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. “His influence was enormous. If he hadn’t come along, I don’t know where we’d be.”

More here.  And here is something I had posted some time ago by Richard Rorty on Eisenman.

Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times:

Timing is the questionable element in “Over There,” Steven Bochco’s 13-episode series about soldiers fighting in Iraq. It is not only the first television drama about the conflict, but also the first American television series that has tried to process a war as entertainment while it was still being fought.

School shootings, presidential scandals and even abuse of Iraqi prisoners are now routinely sifted into “Law & Order” subplots; viewers have become just as inured to the fictionalization of real life on so-called reality television. But even in our hyperaccelerated media culture, “Over There” is fast work.

And that is both troubling and comforting. “Over There,” which begins tonight on FX, is a slick, compelling and very violent distillation of the latest news reports and old war movies and television shows. That alone could make it seem like a show business atrocity, a commercial abuse of a raw and unresolved national calamity.

Except that exploitation is not necessarily a bad thing.

More here.

Katha Politt in The Nation:

Should prochoicers just give up and let Roe go? With the resignation of Sandra Day O’Connor, more people are asking that question. Democratic Party insiders quietly wonder if abandoning abortion rights would win back white Catholics and evangelicals. A chorus of pundits–among them David Brooks in the New York Times and the Washington Post‘s Benjamin Wittes writing in The Atlantic–argue that Roe‘s unforeseen consequences exact too high a price: on democracy, on public discourse, even, paradoxically, on abortion rights. By the early 1970s, this argument goes, public opinion was moving toward relaxing abortion bans legislatively–New York got rid of its ban in 1970, and one-third of states had begun to liberalize their abortion laws by 1973. By suddenly handing total victory to one side, Roe fueled a mighty backlash (and lulled prochoicers into relying on the courts instead of cultivating a popular mandate). In 1993 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg caused a flurry when she seemed to endorse this view: Roe, she declared in a speech, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and…prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” It’s not an insane idea, even if most of its proponents (a) are men; (b) think Roe went too far; and (c) want abortion off the table because they are tired of thinking about it.

More here.

Michael Schirber at Space.com:

Near midnight of July 11, several telescopes in Chile caught a rare and wonderful sight:  the shadow of Pluto’s moon, Charon, as it passed in front of — or occulted — a distant star.

The observations, now being analyzed, may pin down the size of the moon and whether or not it has an atmosphere.  Preliminary indications from one group seem to suggest little or no gaseous envelope.

Charon blocked the light of the relatively faint star C313.2, casting a shadow that was roughly the same size as the moon itself — around 630 miles wide.  A previous occultation by Charon of a different background star was observed in 1980, but only one telescope — with limited precision — managed to observe that event. 

To have eight major telescopes and three separate astronomy teams recording this most recent alignment is considered very fortuitous — especially since a year ago no one knew that this shadowy event would happen at all.

More here.

Christopher Orr in The New Republic:

A Very Long Engagement is all that its title promises. At two and a quarter hours, it is the longest film yet by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet; happily, it is also the most engaging, a stylish and satisfying epic of love and war, hope and memory.

After an early career of directing shorts and commercials, in 1991 Jeunet and partner Marc Caro broke into feature films with the post-apocalyptic black comedy Delicatessen. This was followed by City of Lost Children, another meticulously designed dystopian nightmare. Jeunet and Caro then went their separate ways, with Jeunet pinballing from the embarrassment of Alien: Resurrection to the redemption of Amélie. Throughout this period, it was easy to view Jeunet as essentially a technical director, a kind of Gallic Tim Burton, with a gift for visual dreamscapes but an uneven knack for storytelling. Even in Amélie, his most successful film, the breathless whimsy and directorial gimmickry that made the first hour such a delight began wearing thin well before the film was over.

More here.

Well, what is synaesthesia? Everybody knows the word ‘anesthesia’ which means no sensation.

Synaesthesia means joined sensation, where two or more of the senses are hooked together, so that my voice for example is not only something that they hear but also something that they see or taste or touch.

The most common form of synaesthesia is colored letters and numbers. That is, joining color to integers. That accounts for about two-thirds of cases. The next big group would be sight and sound synaesthesia, or what is called colored hearing. In this, voices, music, environmental sounds will make people see colored photisms—these are shapes that arise, they change and metamorphose a little bit and fade away. Think of it as a little bit like fireworks. So they have a location and space they move around. And they enjoy it very much. There is almost a eureka sensation with this. They can’t imagine what listening to music is like for the rest of us. Of how do we remember people’s names or phone numbers if there is no color there to help us?

more here.

From The National Geographic:

His oversized heart can beat over 200 times a minute and thus pump an extraordinarily large volume of blood and oxygen to his legs. His VO2 max—the maximum amount of oxygen his lungs can take in, an important measurement for an endurance athlete—is extremely high. Early in his career Armstrong showed only average muscle efficiency—the percentage of chemical energy that the muscles are able to harness to produce power. Higher muscle efficiency means greater production of power. From 1992 to 1999, the year of his first Tour de France win, Armstrong was able to increase his muscle efficiency by 8 percent through hard and dedicated training. Coyle says Armstrong is the only human who has been shown to change his muscle efficiency.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In an emergency room at a Finnish hospital, a man sprawled unconscious on an operating table as surgeons labored to reattach the hand he had lost hours earlier while chopping wood. Thirty years later, microsurgery is a commonplace marvel, and as director of plastic surgery research at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Maria Siemionow, 55, is a leading practitioner.

But the career that began in a Helsinki hospital has brought her, and her profession, to an extraordinary moment. A team led by Dr. Siemionow is planning to undertake what may be the most shocking medical procedure to occur in decades: a face transplant.

More here.

John Gray reviews The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman, in the New York Review of Books:

The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx’s vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx’s view of globalization lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the writings of Thomas Friedman. Like Marx, Friedman believe that globalization is in the end compatible with only one economic system; and like Marx he believes that this system enables humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind.

More here.

David Ewing-Duncan in The Guardian:

What would it be like to know all the details of your own personal programming, every A, C, T and G that swirls along the long, sinewy strands of your own double helix? J Craig Venter knows.

He became the first life form on Earth to possess this self-knowledge when in April 2002 he confirmed what many had already suspected: that the human genome sequenced by Venter’s former company, Celera, largely comprised Venter’s own DNA. An act of supreme ego, it flouted one of the prime directives of modern science: that a healthy ambition is fine, even desirable, but only if a person doesn’t tout his own greatness and shows the proper awe and sensibility about the scientific enterprise.

No matter what people think of Craig Venter, he shook things up mightily during the race to sequence the human genome. He had, and continues to have, outrageous ideas that the scientific establishment frequently proclaims are unworkable. Yet Venter has succeeded, drawing on a potent arrogance and self-confidence that have transformed this previously obscure researcher into possibly the best-known molecular biologist in the world after Watson and Crick.

More here.

Penar Musaraj in The Globe and Mail:

Though Ismail Kadare has been lauded for years as a leading figure in contemporary world literature, news of him winning the first ever Man Booker International Prize recently was a surprise to many in literary circles.

In a competition with a shortlist that included Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip Roth, Milan Kundera, Gunter Grass and John Updike, the Albanian writer was given odds of 100 to 1 by The Complete Review, a quarterly literary publication.

Kadare was stunned to find out he was the jury’s choice. “I heard of [the prize] through my editor, and I told him: ‘Are you sure?’ . . . because I have been on the Nobel shortlist of at most three or four authors, a dozen times, but never made it through,” Kadare says, adding he was getting used to being so close to the ultimate stamp of approval, the Nobel Prize for literature.

At 69, Kadare is Albania’s most beloved literary export and one of the central cultural figures in the recently troubled Balkan region — but unlike many other Eastern Europeans writing under socialist regimes, he was no dissident.

More here.

Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian:

Forget Coldplay and James Blunt. Forget even Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, in the version performed at Live8 by Sir Paul McCartney and U2, has become the fastest online-selling song ever. Beethoven has routed the lot of them.

Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.

Sgt Pepper could well end up as the best-selling online track of all time. But its sales figure of just 20,000 online in the two weeks since it has been available contrasts poorly with the admittedly free Beethoven symphonies. (Sgt Pepper cost 79p on the iTunes website.)

More here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

Nobody believed Judah Folkman when, in the 1960s, he claimed that the growth of cancers could be stopped, even reversed, by blocking the tiny vessels that feed them blood. Over the years, however, he has survived peer rejection of his theory, and gone on to develop drugs that did what he predicted they would do. In 1998, endostatin, one of several anti-blood-vessel growth drugs developed in his lab, was hyped by the media as a “cure” for many different cancers. A scant seven years later, Fortune magazine derided it as a “failure.” Both statements turn out to be high exaggerations.

A related drug, called Avastin, was approved for use in the United States in February 2004. Since then, 27 other countries have OK’d it for treating colon cancer. Avastin is also being tested on patients with kidney, breast, and ovarian cancers. In addition, another blood-vessel-growth blocker, Tarceva, has been approved for treatment of lung cancer in the United States.

More here.

From BBC News:

Given our planet’s rich biodiversity, “speciation” clearly happens regularly, but scientists cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it. Now, researchers studying a family of butterflies think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed species. The team, from Harvard University, US, discovered that closely related species living in the same geographical space displayed unusually distinct wing markings.

These wing colours apparently evolved as a sort of “team strip”, allowing butterflies to easily identify the species of a potential mate.

More here.

Hilary Spurling in the New York Review of Books:

By the start of the twentieth century Matisse was well on the way to inventing a new, disturbing, and at that stage virtually incomprehensible visual language. He was a familiar figure, loping about the streets of Montparnasse in a black sheepskin coat turned wrong side out—some said it looked more like a wolfskin—clutching a roll of crazy paintings no other artist could make head or tail of. But almost from one day to the next Matisse drew back from the brink of modernity and started turning out relatively conventional figure and flower pieces. This regression took place in 1902–1903, a phase often referred to by art historians following Barr as Matisse’s Dark Period. His behavior suggested on its face a character of bourgeois timidity: someone who, having stumbled on a potentially disruptive discovery, failed to follow it up because he lacked the courage of his convictions.

In fact, Matisse turned out to have been caught up without warning in a major political and financial fraud, the Humbert Affair, a scheme carried out by one of the Third Republic’s best-known power couples, Frédéric and Thérèse Humbert. The affair rocked France in 1902–1903, causing a trail of bankruptcies, suicides, and bank failures, even threatening at its height to bring down the government. By the time the scandal broke in May 1902, the villains had fled, leaving as scapegoats their housekeeper and her husband, an unsuspecting couple who had for years provided the Humberts with an innocent front. Their name was Parayre, and Matisse had married their daughter. Their public exposure, followed by the arrest and trial of his father-in-law, left Matisse as the sole breadwinner for an extended family of seven. This is why he switched to painting canvases that were at least potentially saleable.

More here.  [For Jack Barth.]

Stefan Lovgren in National Geographic News:

Alarmed by the deaths of eight North Atlantic right whales in the past 16 months, some scientists are calling for immediate protections. Listed as endangered by the U.S. government, the whales are now believed to total about 300.

Four of the right whales were killed by human activities—three by ship collisions and one by fishing gear. A fifth whale was probably also killed in a ship collision.

The deaths were particularly worrying to conservationists, because six of the whales were adult females, three carrying near-term fetuses.

More here.

Randy Kennedy in the New York Times:

If you are not the sort of person who cares deeply about the Old World subtleties of Fournier, the retro-hipster swirl of Ministry Script or the plain-vanilla, rock-ribbed dependability of Helvetica – nor the sort immediately able to identify the typeface you are reading right now as 8.7-point Imperial – then you were probably not aware that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared this week Type Week in New York City.

You also might have assumed that a group of a dozen people wandering around the Upper East Side on Thursday morning, snapping pictures of the unremarkable words “Public School 6” inscribed into stone above an unremarkable red door on East 81st Street were tourists in possession of a badly translated guidebook…

These pilgrims were among about 500 people, some from as far away as Brazil and Finland, who have converged on the city for TypeCon, a yearly gathering of typographers, printers, designers, calligraphers and assorted, self-described font freaks and type nerds who can argue about kerning into the wee hours.

More here.

Margaret Wertheim in LA Weekly:

Until very recently, artificial-intelligence researchers believed that modeling the mind was simply a matter of simulating rational cognition, an activity that was seen to be epitomized by strategical games such as chess and go — but over the past decade, computer scientists have come to understand that a virtual mind needs a virtual psychology. To “think” requires not just an ability to carry through a chain of logical inferences; it also requires a mental environment, or psychic context, in which such rationalizations can be given meaning.

More here.

Keith Thomas in the London Times:

Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other’s saliva and dirt! — Tsonga people of southern Africa on the European practice of kissing, 1927

In what must still be the longest single work devoted to the kiss — Opus Polyhistoricum . . . de Osculis — the German polymath Martin von Kempe (1642-83) assembled 1,040 closely packed pages of excerpts from classical, biblical, legal, medical and other learned sources to form a sort of encyclopaedia of kissing. He listed more than 20 types of kiss. These included the kiss of veneration, the kiss of peace, the kisses bestowed by Christians on images and relics, and by pagans on idols, the kissing of the Pope’s foot, the kiss bestowed by superiors on inferiors, the kiss used in academic degree ceremonies, the lovers’ kiss, the lustful and adulterous kiss, the kiss exchanged by couples sealing their marriage vows, the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss carrying contagion, the hypocritical kiss and the kiss of Judas.

More here.

From The Edge: A talk with Dan Sperber:

How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small elementary processes of interest, are both those which happen inside individuals’ mind — the cognitive psychological processes, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the interactions among individuals through the changes they bring about in their common environment, and in particular, communication.

Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying process from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be an unproblematic copying system, a transmission system, biased only by social interest, for instance, almost in intentional distortion but that otherwise would guarantee a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that communication, imitation, provide a robust replication system.

More here.