Adam Shatz has an obituary on the slain Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir in The Nation.

“Independence seemed to come naturally to Kassir, who never shied away from a cause merely because it was unpopular. In the late 1990s he led a lonely crusade against the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, who had been making inroads into otherwise progressive Arab intellectual circles; four years ago, he helped prevent the pernicious Institute for Historical Review, a Garaudy-affiliated revisionist group based in the United States, from holding a conference in Beirut. At even greater personal risk, Kassir protested what he called Syria’s ‘mafia-type protectorate’ over Lebanon, campaigning tirelessly for independence and railing against a security apparatus most of his colleagues were too timorous to name. Kassir’s open defiance of Damascus brought him unwanted attention from the pro-Syrian security establishment, which harassed him with menacing phone calls, briefly confiscated his passport on the spurious grounds that he was an ‘influential agent of the Palestinian Authority’ and tailed him in unmarked police cars.”

Mathematicians often seem to get irritated by the invocation of Gödel’s Second Theorem as proof or evidence of the a priori limits of human knowledge. When Freeman Dyson did so in his review of Brian Green’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, Solomon Feferman weighed in to raise the mathematican’s objection.

Via Sean Carroll I came across a nice piece by Cosma Shalizi on the theorem and its abuses.

“There are two very common but fallacious conclusions people make from this [Gödel’s theorem], and an immense number of uncommon but equally fallacious errors I shan’t bother with. The first is that Gödel’s theorem imposes some some of profound limitation on knowledge, science, mathematics. Now, as to science, this ignores in the first place that Gödel’s theorem applies to deduction from axioms, a useful and important sort of reasoning, but one so far from being our only source of knowledge it’s not even funny. It’s not even a very common mode of reasoning in the sciences, though there are axiomatic formulations of some parts of physics. . . .

This brings us to the other, and possibly even more common fallacy, that Gödel’s theorem says artificial intelligence is impossible, or that machines cannot think. The argument, so far as there is one, usually runs as follows.”

Read on.

From The BBC News:

If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth – even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated. Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is “complementary” to the present. In other words, you can pop back in time and have a look around, but you cannot do anything that will alter the present you left behind.

More here.

From The New York Times:

An erotic novel written under a pseudonym might normally struggle to find a mainstream publisher and a wide readership. Not so, it seems, when it is penned by a Muslim woman living in a traditional Arab society. “The Almond,” a semi-autobiographical exploration of sexual freedom, has sold 50,000 copies in France since Éditions Plon brought it out here last year. And it has now appeared in eight other languages, including English. With its explicit descriptions of lovemaking, the book has been compared to Marguerite Duras’s coming-of-age novel, “The Lover,” and to Catherine Millet’s more recent confessional essay, “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” Yet in this case the feisty 40-something North African author who goes by the name of Nedjma appears to have been motivated by more than a desire to titillate.

More here.

The opening of the Venice Biennale was the launch date for a new service in the city of venice. the service, develpoed as a collaboration  between the Department of Urban Studies at  MIT and the University of Architecture Venice (IUAV), takes the Venice’s visitors through a discovery path to the hidden layers of Venitian lives and events with the help of video phones.

“Michael Epstein, a researcher for the project, is aware that Wi-Fi walking tours may seem strange for Venice, a place behind the curve when it comes to modernization. “The entire course has a bit of a satiric quality to it,” he says, “in the sense that you’re using the latest technology to explore a city that’s still medieval in many ways.”

More here

From The New York Times:

Azhar Usman, 29, with his knitted skullcap and full beard, presented somewhat differently. An MTV executive, he explained, had recruited him, saying: “We’re going to redefine the identity of the MTV host. It doesn’t have to be someone sexy and good-looking.” A comedian (and lawyer) from Chicago, Mr. Usman used the audition to invent an exaggeratedly accented (and quite amusing) character: Vijay the V.J.

“My uncle in India says desi stands for ‘doctors earn significant incomes.’ My relatives in Pakistan say desi means ‘Don’t ever say India.’ Here on MTV, desi means South Asian flavor, style and music. Check this new video out. It’s going to knock your socks off. You’ve heard of a big production budget. How about 500 backup dancers? This is like ‘Grease’ meets desi, making it …greasy. No, that doesn’t sound right. People think in my country everybody so sad, crying, terrorism,” Vijay said. “We not terrorism, we dancing. Not dancing like panties falling down …. What is this panties falling down” the buttocks?

More here.

Peter Lynd suggests that time is only an illusion, it is just a collection of related events. He is  college drop out, an underdog physicist, who found inspiration for his controversial theory in “I.Q.” a romantic comedy about Einstein’s niece, and is now promoting his upcoming book with the same agent as Dan Brown’s. Not a typical profile of a physicist I would say, but his theory is the latest link in the chain of answers to the question: How does matter move through time and space?

“Enter Lynds. In his theory, reality is merely sequences of events that happen relative to one another; time is an illusion. There’s no chronon, no direction for time’s arrow to fly, no “imaginary time” flowing 90 degrees off the axis of normal time. “I got to a point in my life where I was asking deeper and deeper questions,” Lynds says. “If you want to understand reality, you have to get into physics. And if you’re really interested in physics, you have to ask really big questions.”

More here [via http://www.thecollective.co.il/ – for the Hebrew speaking crowd of 3QD)

From The New York Times:

Some people resent reductionism because it sweeps away many mysteries. Behind spooky phenomena, reductionists have shown, are the ordinary ticktocks of nature’s machinery, the concealed ropes and pulleys of cosmic-scale Penn and Teller tricks. Indeed, reductionism has reinforced the old philosophical suspicion that there is something vaguely unreal about ”reality”: as the Greek philosopher Democritus said, it’s all just atoms and the void. To a hyper-reductionist, the invisibly small microworld is more ”real” than everything else. Bigger objects — cats, toasters, people, the sun, galactic superclusters — are just second-order consequences. The atoms or quarks or leptons (or ”strings,” if you follow the latest trendy theories) are what count, while you and I are just ephemera.

More here.

From The New York Times:

TOM WOLFE was so taken with Michael S. Gazzaniga’s ”Social Brain” that not only did he send Gazzaniga a note calling it the best book on the brain ever written, he had Charlotte Simmons’s Nobel Prize-winning neuroscience professor recommend it in class. In ”The Ethical Brain,” Gazzaniga tries to make the leap from neuroscience to neuroethics and address moral predicaments raised by developments in brain science. The result is stimulating, very readable and at its most edifying when it sticks to science.

Take the issue of raising intelligence by manipulating genes in test-tube embryos. Gazzaniga asks three questions. Is it technically possible to pick out ”intelligence genes”? If so, do those genes alone determine intelligence? And finally, is this kind of manipulation ethical? ”Most people jump to debate the final question,” he rightly laments, ”without considering the implications of the answers to the first two.” Gazzaniga’s view is that someday it will be possible to tweak personality and intelligence through genetic manipulation. But because personhood is so significantly affected by factors like peer influence and chance, which scientists can’t control, we won’t be able to make ”designer babies,” nor, he believes, will we want to.

More here.

Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005, at Stanford:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college.

More here.  [Thanks to James Edward Kolb.]

Nat Hentoff reviews Julia Blackburn’s book in the Wilson Quarterly:

No other jazz singer could get inside lyrics as evocatively as Billie Holiday. “Billie must have come from another world,” trumpet player Roy Eldridge once said, “because nobody had the effect on people she had. I’ve seen her make them cry and make them happy.” Even the famously demanding Miles Davis sang her praises: “She doesn’t need any horns. She sounds like one anyway.”

Lady Day—as tenor saxophonist Lester Young nicknamed her (he often dubbed a female musician “Lady”)—has been the subject of several books and an inauthentic movie (Lady Sings the Blues), but the life that became the music has never been so deeply revealed as it is in With Billie, a collection of more than 150 interviews with musicians, junkies, lovers, narcotics agents, relatives, and a decidedly heterogeneous group of friends. Linda Kuehl conducted many of the interviews in the 1970s, for a biography she didn’t live to complete. Now, Julia Blackburn, a novelist and biographer, has assembled and edited the transcripts, producing a portrait that’s both panoramic and intimate.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Richard Dawkins: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (Free Press) is a genuinely frightening book about terrorism, and the central role played by religion in justifying and rewarding it. Others blame “extremists” who “distort” the “true” message of religion. Harris goes to the root of the problem: religion itself. Even moderate religion is a menace, because it leads us to respect and “cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence”. Why do men like Bin Laden commit their hideous cruelties? The answer is that they “actually believe what they say they believe”. Read Sam Harris and wake up.

Nadeem Aslam: A novelist votes every time he writes a sentence. Ian McEwan’s Saturday (Jonathan Cape) is a lovely and profoundly serious act of engagement with our age. The collapsing of the Twin Towers on 9/11 gave many people – including, I feel, Saturday’s protagonist Perowne – their first glimpse of another kind of world that had been existing alongside ours for some time. It is almost as though the Towers had been blocking a view. Saturday possesses a brilliant understanding of what we see in that view, and what we could possibly do about some of the horrors to be found there.

More here.

From The London Times:

  The Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, is the largest unit in the world performing regular clinical trials involving 10,000 twin volunteers. The basis of its studies on twins is relatively simple, focusing on the principle that identical twins have the same genes, non-identical twins don’t. Twin studies compare traits in these two groups. Twins from both groups are likely to have been exposed to similar environmental influences, but only twins in the identical group have the same genes. The Twin Research Unit finds out which traits and illnesses are partly influenced by the genes that we are born with. It has identified an important genetic component in the following conditions:

Osteoarthritis, previously believed to be caused by “wear and tear”

Short-sightedness

Perfect pitch

Acne

Cataracts — a disease of ageing, but its severity is down to your genes

Migraine, high blood pressure and coronary artery disease — which also seem to involve the same gene

Infidelity — the tendency for both twins to be either faithful or unfaithful was strongest in identical pairs.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

Years ago, in the basement of Yale University’s rare-book library, I stumbled upon two Louis XV armchairs that once belonged to Gertrude Stein. They were upholstered in needlepoint by Alice B. Toklas according to Picasso’s designs. Those chairs long haunted me. They evoked a knowledge remote from the arid deserts of Kant and Hegel to which my studies had confined me—a distinctly feminine savoir faire, a domestic sublime, redolent of the body and warm with conviviality. High culture in an armchair! That premise informs “The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons,” a provocative and engaging show currently at New York’s Jewish Museum. It focuses on 14 Jewish women whose elegant drawing rooms or beachside bungalows, in cultural meccas from 18th-century Berlin to 1940s Santa Monica, attracted a dazzling array of artists, politicians, and intellectuals.

More here.

Iran moves towards elections that are not quite free and fair but are nonetheless a barometer of political moods and movements, perhaps even a watershed.  The phenomenon of blogging elections has reached the Iranian elections, and OpenDemocracy is blogging the latest elections from the Islamic Republic.

“Despite all the early polls indicating a Rafsanjani win there are some very strong signs especially in blogosphere that Moeen the reformist candidate may end up as the winner.

As you know Presidential candidates are all trying to induce cynical voters to go to the polls on Friday and are struggling hard to appeal to young voters.

Rafsanjani as chairman of the powerful Expediency Council has been the centre of political gravity of the regime for quarter of century. Appealing to the youth vote during a nationally televised campaign broadcast created by one of Iran’s leading commercial filmmakers, he even sheds a tear when a young girl complained of restrictions in the Islamic republic.”

Rafsanjani!?!

Mehrdad Mashayekhi believes that the elections will mark a departure from previous models of Iranian politics.

“Iranian society is in the midst of an epoch-making renaissance in its political culture and discourse. This transformation in political values, norms, symbols and everyday codes of behaviour is most evident in educated circles, especially amongst the opposition political elite.

Since the ‘Islamic’ revolution of 1978-79, two distinct political models have assumed hegemonic positions in the opposition movement; first, the anti-imperialist/ revolutionary paradigm, dominant in the 1970s and early 1980s, which I have elsewhere referred to as ‘the problematic of dependency’; and second, the Islamic-reformist paradigm, assuming prominence in 1997 and leading the challenge to the clerical establishment from within the system until 2003.

Since 2003, there are strong indications that a new political paradigm is emerging. The new model of political dissent is democratic, secular and characterised by republican values.”

From The Guardian:

Salman Rushdie is to take part in this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival after a 20-year absence. Organisers of the world’s largest literary festival said they were overjoyed to welcome Rushdie back to Edinburgh and would take whatever steps necessary to protect the author, who was subjected to death threats over his book the Satanic Verses. Rushdie will appear alongside other literary heavyweights such as Margaret Atwood, Dario Fo, Doris Lessing, John Irving and Andre Brink. They are among 500 writers who will take part in this year’s festival, which runs from August 13 to 29.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Fascination hangs over “Irving Penn: Platinum Prints,” which opens Sunday at the National Gallery of Art here. It is an often beautiful but overdetermined and subtly morbid show of 70 images, taken between 1946 and the late 1970’s, and 12 collages made in 1989. These works, along with 20 not on view, have been given to the museum by Mr. Penn.

Most visual artists, regardless of medium, want their work enshrined in a museum, and preferably on their terms. Clyfford Still donated large groups of paintings to prominent museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seemingly to guarantee that entire galleries could be devoted to his work alone. Donald Judd went so far as to build his monument, in the abandoned military and industrial structures of Marfa, Tex. From the darkroom, Mr. Penn has conducted his own enshrinement project. In the end, this exhibition’s main subject is not so much his achievement as how he wants it represented.

More here.

Three terms that would make any innovation enthusiast drool: Mesh networks, open source and music, all combined into one with Roadcasting, a project by   Carnegie-Mellon alumni which is a collaborative and mobile system that allows anyone to have a radio station and broadcast while on the move, specifically in cars. The system is still a  prototype.

“The Quicktime-formatted promotional video for the roadcasting project begins with a black screen that quickly dissolves into a still black-and-white image of a driver sitting behind the steering wheel, wearing a look of frustration and boredom. The narration begins: “Everyone has experienced the headaches of FM radio. There’s the endless commercials, the same old songs over and over again, and the difficulty of finding something that you want to hear. Welcome to the next generation of radio: roadcasting.”

The terrestrial radio industry is already fighting a multi-front battle with the ascendant satellite radio business and nascent podcasting community. Now it has another technological innovation to worry about: roadcasting.”

More Here

China offers lots of opportunities for companies who make business in it. And many companies can’t resist, even if it means that some insignificant words such as “Democracy” or “freedom” disappear from the vocabulary. Technology review is looking at how Microsoft behaves and does not forget yahoo! and google in its hall of fame:

“Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.’s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities — such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

“Prohibited language in text, please delete,” the message says.”

From MSNBC:

Two Brazilian doctors and amateur art lovers believe they have uncovered a secret lesson on human anatomy hidden by Renaissance artist Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Gilson Barreto and Marcelo de Oliveira believe Michelangelo scattered his detailed knowledge of internal anatomy across 34 of the ceiling’s 38 panels. The way they see it, a tree trunk is not just a tree trunk, but also a bronchial tube. And a green bag in one scene is really a human heart.

More here.