John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting? column at ABC News:

…the standard [creationists’] argument goes roughly as follows. A very long sequence of individually improbable mutations must occur in order for a species or a biological process to evolve.

If we assume these are independent events, then the probability of all of them occurring and occurring in the right order is the product of their respective probabilities, which is always an extremely tiny number.

Thus, for example, the probability of getting a 3, 2, 6, 2, and 5 when rolling a single die five times is 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 or 1/7,776 — one chance in 7,776.

The much longer sequences of fortuitous events necessary for a new species or a new process to evolve leads to the minuscule numbers that creationists argue prove that evolution is so wildly improbable as to be essentially impossible.

This line of argument, however, is deeply flawed.

More here.  [Improbable photo shows Paulos with llamas in Peru.]

Chuck Stephens in The Criterion Collection:

…alongside the seven blade runners of Akira Kurosawa’s sword-toting supergroup there might have strode an extra warrior—an “eighth samurai.”

In fact, the existence of a supernumerary slice-artist among those Seven Samurai has been verifiable all along, and sharp-eyed cineastes will have long since spotted his inaugural if momentary membership in that Kurosawa-gumi, just as you can today—by scanning and rescanning the frames between the film’s ten-minute-sixteen- and ten-minute-nineteen-second marks. The fleetingly glimpsed swordsman who saunters through those scant few frames of screen time has no bearing on that 1954 classic’s surrounding narrative, and if you blinked through those three seconds, his absence would remain unfelt—he is but one stubbly bearded mercenary among the many potential warriors-for-hire that the film’s desperate rice farmers observe striding through the city, his only attribute an attitude of indifference, another replacement killer, cameo’ed and left unnamed. But for Tatsuya Nakadai—then a contract player at Shochiku Studios and not yet twenty-three years old—those flash-frames in the spotlight would prove three of the most decisive seconds in front of a camera an actor ever spent.

More here.  [Thanks to David Maier.]

Victor Brombert reviews Flaubert: A Biography by Frederick Brown, in the Times Literary Supplement:

Flaubert maintained that a writer should never celebrate himself, that he should in fact pretend not to have lived. He claimed to be an “homme plume”, a pen man, and that the only adventures in his life were the sentences he wrote. Yet he was not always tied to his desk, quill in hand. He travelled to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Greece. In Paris, in 1848, he witnessed the street fighting and the violence of the mob. He frequented some of the most notable people of the period: the sculptor James Pradier, the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, the critic Sainte-Beuve, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, George Sand – with whom he developed a tender friendship – Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, and Maupassant, who considered himself Flaubert’s disciple. He had a turbulent affair with the writer Louise Colet, one of the most flamboyant women of the century.

More here.

In the Harvard Internation Review, Pepper Culpepper and Archon Fung discuss how the EU can move forward after last year’s rejections of the EU constitution.

European leaders remain divided as to how, or even whether, to move forward with the constitutional project. Political strategies in the aftermath of the rejection of the new constitution have followed two general tracks. The first, common among politicians and bureaucrats who favor further EU integration, is to take some of the institutional pieces proposed in the constitution—such as a single, more powerful EU foreign minister—and ratify them individually, perhaps in national parliaments. Proponents of this approach, such as EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso, stress that such measures would streamline decision-making in a European Union of 25 members. The second view, voiced especially by Euro-skeptic politicians and many scholars who study the European Union, such as Princeton University’s Andrew Moravcsik, holds that the defeat of the constitution has at last dashed the silly idea of a European super-state. Having largely succeeded in building incremental projects that national governments wanted—notably the single market and single currency—the European Union should stick to creating similar projects in the future. The ideal of a federal Europe long promoted by those seeking “ever closer union” is dead: good riddance!

These two views miss a fundamental driver of the constitutional treaty’s rejection: the deep alienation of many European citizens from the project of integration. Both the Euro-philes and Euro-skeptics take an essentially technocratic perspective and seek to advance their respective agendas along the least politically resistant path. Both groups focus on what the European Union can achieve without referenda because they cannot secure sufficient popular support for their agendas. In a union of democratic member-states, however, this approach is self-defeating and illegitimate. Popular disaffections manifested in national referenda are only superficial symptoms of a deeper democratic malaise within the member-states themselves. None of the European project’s broader goals can be achieved durably without addressing that root cause.

In the Economist:

IN THE 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by manipulating the logical statement “all ravens are black”, you could derive the equivalent “all non-black objects are non-ravens”. Such topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to keep philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they cannot do too much damage. However, a number of computer scientists, led by Fernando Esponda of Yale University, are taking Hempel’s notion as the germ of an eminently practical scheme. They are applying such negative representations to the problem of protecting sensitive data. The idea is to create a negative database. Instead of containing the information of interest, such a database would contain everything except that information.

The concept of a negative database took shape a couple of years ago, while Dr Esponda was working at the University of New Mexico with Paul Helman, another computer scientist, and Stephanie Forrest, an expert on modelling the human immune system. The important qualification concerns that word “everything”. In practice, that means everything in a particular set of things.

In ScienceNOW Daily News:

The life of African-American middle-school students can be pretty stressful. From the moment they step into the classroom, some must contend with not only coursework but also the anxiety that performing badly might confirm negative stereotypes. That fear can itself lead to poor performance, researchers have known for a while; now they’ve come up with a simple antidote: getting students to reflect on their sense of self-worth by writing a personal essay about what they value.

Geoffrey Cohen, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues tested the strategy among 243 seventh graders at a northeastern U.S. school that had a roughly 50:50 ratio of African-American and white students. Each student was asked to complete a 15-minute writing assignment that included a page with a list of values such as one’s relationships with friends, athletic ability, and creativity. Students circled their top two or three values. On the next page, they wrote a few sentences explaining their choices and describing moments when they had felt the importance of the chosen values. The researchers designed a similar assignment for a control group in which students had to circle the value they thought was least important to them and explain why that value could be important to other people. The students were not told the purpose of the assignment.

From BBC:

Downtown is transformed – the gaping gash of the World Trade Center remains largely unfilled. The pit is acquiring the machinery which will be the working engine of the Freedom Tower, and there is a new underground station, but Ground Zero is still a wound. And that gives a different look to the whole city. The twin towers were a landmark that could be seen all over Manhattan so if you emerged from the subway, you only had to look up and know which direction you were facing.

The gap when you look down 7th Avenue, for example, now feels like something is missing – which, of course, there is. The open sky seems like the absence of a limb or a pair of teeth knocked out.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Resembling nothing so much as Chewbacca’s children, two of the world’s tiniest monkeys debuted recently at the Frösö Zoo in Ostersund, Sweden. Shown here shortly after their birth, these pygmy marmosets are exceedingly rare. It’s not because they’re twins though—pygmy marmosets are typically born in pairs—but because they’re albinos, deficient in pigment.

The world’s smallest species of monkey, this tree-dwelling marmoset makes big noise, contributing clicks, whistles, and squeals to the cacophony of their home habitat, the western Amazon rain forest of South America. Adults grow to about 5 inches (13 centimeters) in length and weigh about 6 ounces (170 grams).

More here.

Naoya Hatakeyama. Blast #8316. 1995-2003.

More of this fabulous artist’s work can be seen here and here.

Reyhan Harmanci in the San Francisco Chronicle:

While his views may not be popular in Northern California, Wallace Sampson, clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University and editor in chief of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, is frank about his thoughts about alternative medicine. “It doesn’t exist,” he says. “We’ve looked into most of the practices and, biochemically or physically, their supposed effects lie somewhere between highly improbable and impossible.”

There are two major misconceptions about acupuncture, Sampson says, and both contribute to the misunderstanding of its worth as medical treatment. First, most people assume that it’s an ancient Chinese cure that has existed, unchanging, for centuries. Not so, says Sampson, noting that “acupuncture was formalized in a complex way over the past 100 years, mostly in Europe and France and after the Communist takeover in China. Before that time there was no consistent formalization of acupuncture points or what each place was supposed to do. It was largely regional, and the thinking varied from city to city.”

More here.

Harry Reynolds reviews Spoiling for a Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer by Brooke Masters, at Nth Position:

Spitzer, transforming what attorney generals do, attacked midwestern power plants for polluting New York, ripped into the Food Emporium and A&P, Gristedes and other major supermarkets and drugstore chains, for mindboggling working conditions of immigrant deliverymen, and convicted the first felonious sweatshop operator in a decade. His unsuccessful attempt to bring gun manufacturers under control proved him a man of initiative, practical, yet moral, quick to learn early the golden lesson of watching one’s back even when dealing with one’s apparent ally, a lesson he may have occasion to recall when governor. As for righteous anger, when the Red Cross attempted to divert 9/11 funds to its other causes, Spitzer seized it, as it were, by the neck, compelling it to use every cent for 9/11 victims.

Turning towards Wall Street, Spitzer saw hanging fruit ripe for the taking. When Merrill Lynch was taken by Spitzer in the direction of the gallows for bid rigging, its attorney, Robert Morvillo, warned Spitzer that “Merrill Lynch has a lot of powerful friends”.

More here.

On 28 September 2006, at 7 p.m., the London Review of Books will host a public debate in the Great Hall, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Cooper Square, New York, on the subject:

Panellists: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer, Dennis Ross

Moderator: Anne-Marie Slaughter

Tickets for the debate are $25 per person. You can buy them online from Ticket Central at: www.ticketcentral.com/index.asp?p=promocode&pid=5020 or telephone: +1 212 279 4200

More info here.

Via Yahoo! Picks:

Since the beginning of 2000, excluding the times that he forgets, Noah K. has taken a daily photo of himself. At the beginning of each month, he uploads the self-portraits to his web site, where interested parties can scroll through day after day of his likeness. Sometimes he appears in the dark, sometimes his face is well-lit. Always, he sports a grave expression, as if something might be about to happen that requires concentration or reserve. Now, Noah has spliced the images together into a video… Watching the loop, it’s hard not to fixate on the changing background, the ebb and flow of Noah’s hair, or the fluctuating colors of his shirts, because as the years fly past, Noah’s sober face and dark brown eyes remain amazingly—almost eerily—steadfast.

Noah’s site here.

In the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt takes another look at Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism (which Cosma Shalizi will tell you is the magesterial piece on the topic) and the history and future of the movement.

Main Currents of Marxism is not the only first-rate account of Marxism, though it is by far the most ambitious. What distinguishes it is Kolakowski’s Polish perspective. This probably explains the emphasis in his account on Marxism as an eschatology —”a modern variant of apocalyptic expectations which have been continuous in European history.” And it licenses an uncompromisingly moral, even religious reading of twentieth-century history:

The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.

No Western commentator on Marxism, however critical, ever wrote like that.

But then Kolakowski writes as someone who has lived not just inside Marxism but under communism. He was witness to Marxism’s transformation from an intellectual theorem to a political way of life. Thus observed and experienced from within, Marxism becomes difficult to distinguish from communism—which was, after all, not only its most important practical outcome but its only one. And the daily deployment of Marxist categories for the vulgar purpose of suppressing freedom—which was their primary use value to Communists in power—detracts over time from the charms of the theorem itself.

In the Observer, Martin Amis imagines the last days of Muhammad Atta.

“No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why [Muhammad] Atta and [Abdulaziz al] Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on Flight 5930 on the morning of September 11”

The 9/11 Commission Report

On 11 September 2001, he opened his eyes at 4am, in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began.

What was the scene of this awakening? A room in a hotel, of the type designated as ‘budget’ in his guidebook – one up from ‘basic’. It was a Repose Inn, part of a chain. But it wasn’t like the other Repose Inns he had lodged at: brisk, hygienic establishments. This place was ponderous and labyrinthine, and as elderly as most of its clientele. And it was cheap. So. The padded nylon quilt as weighty as a lead vest; the big cuboid television on the dresser opposite; and the dented white fridge – where, as it happened, Muhammad Atta’s reason for coming to Portland, Maine, lay cooling on its shelf… The particular frugality of these final weeks was part of a peer-group piety contest that he was laconically going along with. Like the others, he was attending to his prayers, disbursing his alms, washing often, eating little, sleeping little. (But he wasn’t like the others.) Days earlier, their surplus operational funds – about $26,000 – had been abstemiously wired back to the go-between in Dubai.

He slid from the bed and called Abdulaziz, who was already stirring, and perhaps already praying, next door. Then to the bathroom: the chore of ablution, the ordeal of excretion, the torment of depilation. He activated the shower nozzle and removed his undershorts. He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh. Then he spent an unbelievably long time trying to remove a hair from the bar of soap; the alien strand kept changing its shape – question-mark, infinity symbol – but stayed in place; and the bar of soap, no bigger than a bookmatch when he began, barely existed when he finished.

Given that it’s APSA week, here’s a piece in PS: Political Science and Politics by Laura Olson and John Green on “gapology”, the fixation on gaps in electoral behavior. (The piece introduces a special issue on gaps.)

All manner of political observers are fascinated by “gaps” in voting behavior. Whether it is the now-famous gender gap, the newly discovered religion gap, or the once prominent generation gap, sharp differences in partisanship and voting behavior often emerge around commonplace demographic characteristics such as gender, worship attendance, and age. These gaps are not just intrinsically interesting; they also offer a potent way to understand election results. Like batting averages in baseball, such simple statistics offer the power of language in describing the political world.

Of course, most people understand that such voting “gaps” represent oversimplifications of the complex reality of voting behavior. But it is precisely such complexity that makes “gapology” so attractive: it connects something of compelling importance (such as who was elected president) with some key facts of everyday life (people’s most obvious characteristics).

Voters respond to these gaps. They conceive of themselves as belonging to one group or another, and these feelings of group membership affect their voting choices—and therefore who is elected to political office. As a consequence, voting gaps become touchstones for political journalists and their readers. Even more importantly, they become basic metrics used by political professionals (the pollsters, consultants, and campaign managers who conduct today’s campaigns). Even political scientists find voting gaps fascinating. It is a rare election analysis that does not begin with a tabulation of the vote and demography—and an inspiration for research on the social bases of the vote.

In Dissent, David Plotke maps the political terrain and assesses the chances of a Democratic victory in 2006 and 2008.

In the present phase of U.S. national politics, going back to 1968, conservative Republicans have normally won presidential elections. Democratic failures have been paired with occasional victories for centrist candidates whose administrations have not produced wonderful results. Thus it makes sense that the debate between centrist and leftist opposition strategies goes on and on, as it will from now through the autumn of 2008. One way to make debate between “centrist” and “leftist” forms of opposition to the Republicans less costly would be to produce attractive and plausible new programs that address widely perceived failures of Republican governance. Unfortunately, there is not much sign of such innovation in or near the Democratic Party—this notable absence will doubtless strengthen the case that the centrist course is the sensible way to proceed. Those who are uncomfortable with a centrist approach are obliged not just to register the intensity of their opposition to Bush. They need to articulate new perspectives and programs that do not reinforce the pro-Republican logic of so many recent policy debates, with the public concluding that low taxes and high but unequal growth are better than ill-conceived and expensive programs that require big tax increases and might jeopardize growth. Such innovation is a key part of focusing debate in ways that are strategically advantageous; it benefits Democrats if the legitimate desire to focus on social policy and severe inequalities accompanies interesting proposals about what to do next, rather than relying mainly on a (legitimate) moral critique of Republican policies.

The durable political shift that analysts debated in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s really did happen, though not in the form of a New Deal–style political realignment. The prevalent Republican framework is badly worn, and the damage is due in large part to the rigidity and misjudgments of the Bush administration. Thus Democratic electoral prospects are very good in 2006 and at least decent in 2008.

From The Village Voice:

In 1967, Walter Brooke famously asked Dustin Hoffman to consider “just one word,” a word that had come to represent, for many of the era, a sleek soullessness: plastics. Whether or not a young, soon-to-be-famous sculptor named Eva Hesse saw The Graduate that year, she would shortly take the advice, but in ways that upended the connotations. Hesse used plastics and rubber—specifically, resin, fiberglass, and latex—to transform the vogue of a cold, corporate-like minimalism into something softer and more approachable. A smartly comprehensive exhibit at the Jewish Museum reveals that Hesse’s sculpture, though physically deteriorating somewhat, still enchants.

Minimalism’s kingpins billed their movement as a thoughtful rebuke to overt expression, but the work often seemed manufactured—perfect forms that elicited little more from the viewer than they gave. White paintings received blank stares. Though strongly influenced by these artists (Sol LeWitt was a good friend), Hesse sort of rebuked the rebuke, introducing chance, defect, and variation—and thereby delightful flora and fauna elements—into geometry and repetition.

More here.

From Science:

The decision to mesh motherhood with a nascent career as an environmental biologist wasn’t one that Margaret Dalzwell Lowman had the luxury of choosing. Rather, it was a lifestyle born out of necessity. After completing her doctorate at the University of Sydney in 1983, Lowman (pictured left) launched her career as a visiting professor in the Department of Biology and Environmental Sciences at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts–the same college she attended as an undergraduate. She was recently divorced and had two active young sons, ages 3 and 5.

But she was determined to make it work. “When I became a single mom, I looked at the world a little differently,” she says. “Suddenly I had to be successful because my children were depending on me.” Sixteen years later, Lowman has scaled new heights, literally and figuratively: She found a niche for herself studying the world’s forest canopies, which are home to about 40 percent of all biological species. She has pioneered techniques for canopy access, including ropes, walkways, hot-air balloons, and construction cranes. She also found time to write two critically acclaimed books, Life in the Treetops and It’s a Jungle Up There: More Tales from the Treetops, which document the ecology of the canopy, particularly its plant-insect relationships. The most recent book was co-authored with her two sons, James and Eddie.

More here.

Christina Lamb reviews Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, in the London Times:

The Silk Road has long been a great romantic destination for travellers. At university, I remember poring over maps with a friend, considering retracing it through evocatively named places such as Tashkent and Samarkand. What we soon discovered was that the Silk Road was never a road, but a shifting network of routes starting in China and crossing central Asia. Until I read Thubron’s book, however, I did not know that the route (which dates from Roman times) has been called the Silk Road only since the 19th century when the term was coined by a German. Nor was it used just for transporting silk. The camel trains that left Changan were often laden with iron, bronze, lacquer work and ceramics, and they would come back with Indian spices, glass, golden and silver artefacts, woollens and the western marvel of chairs. Later, they would transport fruit and flowers, including the first roses to arrive in the West. The road was also a conduit for ideas, religion and scientific knowledge. Among the revolutionary inventions that it took west from China were printing, gunpowder and the compass.

The northern route chosen by Thubron traverses some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, skirting the Gobi desert through asbestos mountains and “expanses of alarming yellow nothingness” to Kashgar and on to the ancient Mediterranean port of Antioch.

More here.