From the London Review of Books:

They were friends, companions, painters-in-arms committed to what was, at the start of the 20th century, the newest and most provoking form of art. Braque was just the younger, but there was little assumption of seniority by the other. They were co-adventurers, co-discoverers; they painted side by side, often the same subject, and their work was at times almost indistinguishable. The world was young, and their painting lives lay ahead of them.

You have to feel sorry for Othon Friesz, Braque’s fellow Le Havrean and loyal confederate in Fauvism, his proto-Picasso. While Braque moved on with his new Spanish friend to make the greatest breakthrough in Western art for several centuries, and Cubism relegated Fauvism to a jaunty memory, Friesz had to get on with the rest of his life and the rest of his career. Strangely, the two painters had their first joint show – a posthumous one – only last summer, at the Musée de Lodève. It proved a display of unintentional cruelty. The most compelling Fauve paintings were all by Braque; but while this was just a stage in his development (though a fondly remembered one – fifty years later he bought back his own The Little Bay at La Ciotat), it turned out to be what Friesz did best.

More here.

Essay-Slide show by Caitlin DeSilvey in Slate:

Letting man-made structures decay to the point of disappearance is not an idea with a lot of popular or professional support, at least in America. In the mid-1990s, however, sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara proposed a “ruins park” for the mostly empty urban core of Detroit. In his “American Acropolis,” the vacant buildings would become habitat for peregrine falcons and intrepid plants. The prairie would reseed the city streets. People would gather to witness a “memorial to a disappearing urban civilization.” Detroit citizens did not welcome the proposal. It mattered little to them that Vergara found redemption and beauty, as well as regret, in their husk of a city.

In this slide, Vergara’s photo of the derelict reading room of the Camden Free Library in New Jersey, a thicket of saplings reaches toward a tattered ceiling’s filtered light.

More here.

Leonard David at Space.com:

An early look at space sports comes courtesy of the Zero-Gravity Corporation (ZERO-G) – a space entertainment and tourism company headquartered in Dania Beach, Florida.

Making use of a modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, ZERO-G provides thrill-seekers that free-fall feeling so enjoyed by astronauts. The firm’s “G-Force One” plane makes roller coaster-like maneuvers in the air with dives and pullouts repeated numbers of times for paying customers.

ZERO-G has been looking at a variety of weightless sports, said Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer of the company. The group has been approached by a range of individuals and companies having an array of ideas for space sports, he said.

More here.

John Allen Paulos told me the following joke: “Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“A: To cause a global pandemic.”

Robert Dorit reviews The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu by Mike Davis, in American Scientist:

As Davis points out, the concentration of economic power and influence in huge poultry conglomerates militates against a rapid and rational response to outbreaks of bird flu. In chilling detail, The Monster at Our Door exposes the political pressures exerted on the government of Thailand by Charoen Pokphand (CP), the country’s dominant poultry concern. These pressures have slowed the reporting of avian influenza, obstructed the monitoring of chicken and duck facilities, and limited efforts to cull infected flocks in order to prevent the spread of disease. They have also redirected the government’s control measures onto the few remaining small farmers who raise chickens, often forcing them out of business and thus further tightening CP’s food monopoly in Thailand. (This story of political corruption and influence is not without its surrealistic touches: In 2004, the Thai ambassador to Moscow offered to barter 250,000 tons of Thai chicken—the shipment would have begun with 60,000 tons of chicken possibly contaminated with H5N1—in exchange for Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter aircraft. The offer was declined.)

More here.

Gary S. Settles in American Scientist:

Recent attacks by terrorists using improvised explosive devices have reinforced the importance of understanding blasts, explosions and the resulting shock waves. These waves can be powerfully damaging in their own right, but in addition, studying them can help to quantify their originating explosions and can provide insight into how buildings and airplanes can be hardened to resist damage resulting from such blasts.

Their almost-total invisibility has given shock waves a mystique that has been exploited by Hollywood in countless scenes where explosions send heroes diving for cover. Like sound waves, shock waves are as transparent as the air through which they travel. Usually they can only be seen clearly by special instruments under controlled conditions in the laboratory.

Now, however, our research group has taken modern high-speed videography equipment and combined it with some classical visualization methods to image shock waves from explosions and gunshots in more realistic environments. This allows us to capture the development and progress of these wave fronts on a scale that has not been possible in the past.

More here.

These are just some pictures of bicycles in Amsterdam that my friend Mert Kerim took. I thought they were nice. Check more out here.

Laura Sheahen at Beliefnet via One Good Move:

British biologist Richard Dawkins has made a name for himself defending evolution and fighting what he sees as religiously motivated attacks on science. Dr. Dawkins sat down with Beliefnet at the World Congress of Secular Humanism, where his keynote address focused on intelligent design.

You’re concerned about the state of education, especially science education. If you were able to teach every person, what would you want people to believe?

I would want them to believe whatever evidence leads them to; I would want them to look at the evidence, judge it on its merits, not accept things because of internal revelation or faith, but purely on the basis of evidence.

Not everybody can evaluate all evidence; we can’t evaluate the evidence for quantum physics. So it does have to be a certain amount of taking things on trust. I have to take what physicists say on trust, for example, because I’m a biologist. But science [has] a system of appraisal, of peer review, so that I trust the physics community to get their act together in a way that I know from the inside. I wish people would put their trust in evidence, not in faith, revelation, tradition, or authority.

More here.

Are comic books Art? The question has been a thorny one since comics first appeared over a century ago and highbrow pundits predicted that the Sunday funny pages would destroy the fragile public’s chances of bettering themselves through exposure to the classics. Of course, they were right (thank God!), and comics — along with all the other exciting new popular art forms that emerged over the course of the 20th century (as well as certain strains of Modernist art making) — threw a monkey wrench into the stuffy, inhibited, inbred and arbitrary mechanisms by which such distinctions are decreed. Effectively, the authority of a few wealthy pillars of society to bestow immortality on those who toed the party line — and obscurity and poverty on those who didn’t — was wrested away and recast as a question of popular — and, to some degree, critical — consensus.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

Here, for instance, is one writer in all-too-familiar high dudgeon: modern art, he says, is “decadent,” “narcissistic,” “meaningless,” “valueless.” These are not the words of some primitive from the outer reaches of rural Alabama. They come from a New York critic at the red-hot center of the contemporary art scene – Donald Kuspit, the editor of Art Criticism, a contributing editor of Artforum, a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook – and they appear in his most recent book, appropriately entitled “The End of Art.” Kuspit begins that book by quoting a news article certain to delight anyone who has grown skeptical about what is called art these days: In 2001, a high-priced gallery in London exhibited a work by Damien Hirst consisting of discarded coffee cups, empty beer bottles, candy wrappers and other detritus. It was valued at six figures. But a cleaning man, not being an art connoisseur, tossed the whole thing out with the trash. “The cleaning man,” Kuspit comments, “was clearly the right critic.”

from a major broadside in the New York Times by Barry Gewen.

From The New York Times:

THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION
The Conquest of the Middle East.
By Robert Fisk.
At least in part, “The Great War for Civilisation” is a stimulating and absorbing book, by a man who speaks Arabic, who has known the region better than most and has met the leading players, from bin Laden to Ahmad Chalabi (who offered to introduce him to Oliver North). It is a formidable production; and as Dr. Johnson said of “Paradise Lost,” no man ever wished it longer.

He doesn’t let us forget that he loathes Saddam Hussein, and is contemptuous of Yasir Arafat even as he sarcastically mentions his own anti-Israeli reputation. Then he goes on to write about “Israel’s policy of state murder” and “the American journalists who report in so craven a fashion from the Middle East.” This newspaper and its writers are regularly pummeled, notably “Tom Friedman, an old friend but an increasingly messianic columnist.” Friedman can look after himself, but if I were Fisk I would not lightly use the word “messianic” about anyone.

More here.

From Science:

One of the hottest new fields in American science appears to be figuring out what is wrong with American science and how to correct it. Numerous recent reports by high-level study groups have examined why the United States is losing ground to foreign competitors who are poised, say the studies’ authors, to wrest away the undisputed scientific pre-eminence it has enjoyed since the end of World War II. In today’s “flat world,” Thomas Friedman writes, computers and instantaneous communications eliminate many of America’s erstwhile advantages and allow technical workers in India, China, and Ireland to do jobs that Americans once held. Among the “most important” questions now facing the nation, he states, are why we are losing technical jobs, why our young people make a poor showing on international science and math tests, why “the world is racing us to the top, not the bottom, and why we are quietly falling behind.”

More here.

“Its union busting tactics against grad students are breaking laws and undermining academic freedom.”

Gordon Lafer in Newsday:

Traditionally, universities serve a very particular role in society. Conceived specifically as a refuge from the dog-eat-dog world of the market, they are home to a wider range of ideas than is tolerated in the business world. This is so because universities are the only place where you can’t get fired for saying what you think. They are a community of scholars where individuals are freed to pursue their notion of truth, knowing that, as long as their work is rigorous, their careers will not be sabotaged in retaliation for espousing the “wrong” view.

This form of academic freedom is made possible by one of two things: the institution of tenure or a union contract. By cutting back on tenured positions while refusing to recognize teachers’ unions, NYU is undermining both pillars of academic freedom. In this way, academic managers are pushing a new vision of higher education – not a community of independent scholars freed to boldly pursue their notions of truth, but a place of permanent insecurity, where everyone is afraid to speak out against those in power…

Union busting is a sleazy practice in any industry. But in a university, it takes a further toll. It undermines the very integrity of intellectual life that draws people to academia in the first place. There is still time for NYU to reverse course and do the right thing. It is for all of us – particularly New York taxpayers who subsidize the tax-exempt university – to insist that it do so.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

From Science:

Astronomers have resolved a long-standing debate about how far our sun is from a nearby cluster of stars in the Milky Way. The new measurement may help scientists more accurately map out the shape of the galaxy, as well as determine the amount of gravitational “muscle” its star-filled arms contain.

The Milky Way is composed of several spiral arms–long, thin bands of bright, young stars that fan out from the center like the blades of a pinwheel. Our sun is located in the rather short Orion spiral arm, which is tucked inside the larger Perseus spiral arm. But astronomers aren’t sure how far away the Perseus arm is, and knowing that could help them determine the true size and makeup of the Milky Way. Two separate measurements of Perseus’ distance have given values that differ by a factor of 2–a large discrepancy even by astronomy standards, says Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Lucy Newlyn was surprised and impressed by the variety and quality of the responses to her exercise on ‘inscape’ poetry. “I came to the exercise with a strong preconception about the ‘best’ kind of inscape poetry, and was expecting lyric poems focusing closely on visual and acoustic impressions, without any surrounding context or narrative. (I admire the steady, eye-on-the object-animal poetry of Lawrence and Hughes). I was therefore intrigued by the number of poems that tell or suggest a story.”

How to photograph the heart by Christine Klocek-Lim

You remember how the lens squeezed
unimportant details into stillness:
the essential trail of rain down glass,
the plummet of autumn-dead leaves,
your grandfather’s last blink when
the breath moved on.
Your startled hands compressed
the shutter when you realized: this is it,
this is the last movement he will take
away from the silent fall of morphine,
beyond the soft gasp of the nurse,
past the sick, slow thud of your heart
moving in the luminous silence.

More here.

Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Nation:

Last May, I wrote an Annals of Outrage II chronicling the waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government in the first half of 2004. Plenty of time has passed since my last piece and much has happened. Here, then, is my latest attempt to guide you through the Bush Administration’s most egregious corruption scandals. The information comes to us courtesy of the federal government’s internal investigations into administration fraud, waste and abuse. The cronyism and corruption have hit a new low.

More here.

Terry Teachout reviews Marion Elizabeth Rodger’s Mencken: The American Iconoclast, in The New Criterion:

You don’t pour years of your life into writing a biography unless you feel an initial bond of sympathy with the subject, and, though many a biographer has grown disillusioned along the way, it’s obvious from reading Mencken: The American Iconoclast that Rodgers still admires and, just as important, likes the man about whom she has written. But how closely does that man resemble the real H. L. Mencken? Have Rodgers’s sympathies led her to smooth his rough edges, or downplay less palatable aspects of Mencken’s work that might not sit well alongside her frank admiration? The answer, I suspect, will depend on how much you yourself like Mencken. Rodgers has been honest enough about his unattractive aspects. The coldness, the opportunism, even the anti-Semitism (though she never goes quite so far as to call it that) are all amply documented in her book. Nevertheless, she clearly feels the bad to be vastly outweighed by the good…

More here.

Andrew Sullivan in The New Republic:

Why is torture wrong? It may seem like an obvious question, or even one beneath discussion. But it is now inescapably before us, with the introduction of the McCain Amendment banning all “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of detainees by American soldiers and CIA operatives anywhere in the world. The amendment lies in legislative limbo. It passed the Senate in October by a vote of 90 to nine, but President Bush has vowed to veto any such blanket ban on torture or abuse; Vice President Cheney has prevailed upon enough senators and congressmen to prevent the amendment–and the defense appropriations bill to which it is attached–from moving out of conference; and my friend Charles Krauthammer, one of the most respected conservative intellectuals in Washington (and a New Republic contributing editor) has written a widely praised cover essay for The Weekly Standard endorsing the legalization of full-fledged torture by the United States under strictly curtailed conditions. We stand on the brink of an enormously important choice–one that is critical, morally as well as strategically, to get right.

More here.

Emma Pollack-Pelzner in the Yale Review of Books:

Most people think that choice is good. After all, we associate choice with autonomy, control, independence and desirable outcomes. In reality, however, this is not the case. As Schwartz emphasizes, too many choices actually lead to less happiness, a lower sense of control, and even paralysis. And this is the paradox he addresses: we think we want more choices, but when we have more options we are, in general, less satisfied.

One of many studies demonstrating this paradox involves a simple decision: buying jam. Testers set up in a supermarket offered one group of shoppers six jams to sample. They offered another group 24 varieties to taste. Despite the fact that we would predict people with a larger jam selection would be more likely to find a jam they would like, the study found that those offered only six jams were much more likely to make a jam purchase, and were more likely to be happy with that purpose.

More here.

3QD’s own Ruth Kikin-Gil has a great design project worth looking at:

Goals and Background

Modern lives are increasingly becoming more flexible, connected and mobile. We were asked to create an installation for the Fjord’s office space that will communicate the themes of mobility and its influence on people’s lives. Fjord is a leading developer of digital products and services for people on the move.

PEOPLE+ installation exposes flows of communication, and stresses the fact that mobile communication expands the boundaries of a person and augments the distances one can reach.
A company = people + communication

Visual elements

Oriental calligraphy was the inspiration for the figurines we used in the installation

The installation uses the human figure symbol and the Plus {+} sign as a vehicle to tell a story. And the story is simple: connect one human being to another, and you have a network, and mobile communication is all about networks. It is some kind of emotional math if you will.

More here.

Today is the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I grew up with Beatles music from a very early age because my two sisters (Azra and Sughra Raza) who were young teenagers at the time were diehard fans. (Apparently my first full sentence was some Beatles lyric.) There are all sorts of memorials being held tonight, not least the one at Strawberry Fields in Central Park, just across the street from the Dakota where JL lived and Yoko Ono still does, and where he was shot. It is not far from where I live, and I might stop by later. Here’s Steven Winn in the San Francisco Chronicle:

He was shot and killed, 25 years ago today, by a mad fan who thought he’d sold out and become a phony. On this Dec. 8, hundreds of biographies, broadsides, candlelight vigils, documentaries, reconsiderations and a Broadway musical later, John Lennon remains in the culture’s magnified crosshairs. And still we can’t quite get a fix on him.

Almost anyone of a certain age, now as then, has an opinion; a construct; a shadowy, imperfectly mapped place where Lennon lives and how his music — even if we only experienced it as a backdrop, as I did — helped place us in the world and simultaneously question that place. “Strawberry Fields Forever.” “Imagine.” “Beautiful Boy.” “I Am the Walrus.” “In My Life.” “Mother.” “Help!” The titles of the songs — everyone has his own private playlist — are enough. They summon things, take us back and remind us what we took forward and what we left behind. They stop time and expand it.

More here.