Reflections on flying by David Sedaris in The New Yorker:

On the flight to Raleigh, I sneezed, and the cough drop I’d been sucking on shot from my mouth, ricocheted off my folded tray table, and landed, as I remember it, in the lap of the woman beside me, who was asleep and had her arms folded across her chest. I’m surprised that the force didn’t wake her—that’s how hard it hit—but all she did was flutter her eyelids and let out a tiny sigh, the kind you might hear from a baby.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have had three choices, the first being to do nothing. The woman would wake up in her own time, and notice what looked like a shiny new button sewn to the crotch of her jeans. This was a small plane, with one seat per row on Aisle A, and two seats per row on Aisle B. We were on B, so should she go searching for answers I would be the first person on her list. “Is this yours?” she’d ask, and I’d look dumbly into her lap.

“Is what mine?”

More here.

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

Nobody knows painting better than painters. So it’s not surprising that they produce some of the finest writing on the subject. But much of this writing remains scattered–in back issues of magazines or in letters and journals that rarely if ever see the light of day. When such work gets into print there’s cause for celebration. And that’s true right now. For new collections of writing by two important twentieth-century American painters, Fairfield Porter and Myron Stout, have just appeared.

Material Witness: The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter and Selections from the Journals of Myron Stout are terrific books. They’re suffused with the questing, restless, daring intellectual rhythms of a painter’s life.

More here.

Michael Schirber at Space.com:

Two dense stars whipping around each other at breakneck speed may be the strongest known source of Einstein’s space-trembling gravity waves.

The double star – called RX J0806 – was discovered in 1994 in X-rays. Later shown to be blinking on and off every 5.4 minutes, the two-star setup is believed to be a pair of white dwarfs – the dense ashes of burnt-out stars – rotating around each other.

The implied separation is just 50,000 miles – a mere one-fifth the distance between the Earth and the Moon, making this the closest stellar pair ever observed. The tangled duo should be booming out gravity waves – undulations in the fabric of space and time predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

More here.

David Kravets of the AP:

Q: What was the case decided by the Supreme Court?

A: The justices overruled an injunction against federal prosecution of two California women with doctor’s recommendations for marijuana use. The decision clarifies that the federal government can prosecute violators of federal drug laws, even when people are following state law.

Q: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state allow patients with a doctor’s recommendation to smoke and grow marijuana, or to have it grown for them. Should medical marijuana users in these states now fear federal prosecution?

A: Federal authorities have already made more than 60 medical marijuana arrests in the last five years nationally, almost all of them in California. But such raids remain relatively uncommon. The Justice Department declined to discuss its strategy, but “people shouldn’t panic,” California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said.

Q: What have the 10 states done in reaction to Monday’s ruling?

A: Oregon tentatively stopped issuing medical marijuana identification cards to new patients, but it was business as usual in the other states.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Jonathan Raban in the New York Review of Books:

Robert Lowell’s star has waned very considerably since his death in 1977, when his obituarists treated him, along with Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, as one of the handful of unquestionably great twentieth-century poets. The publication two years ago of Frank Bidart and David Gewanter’s massive edition of the Collected Poems did much to restore his work to public and critical view, but even now Lowell’s poems are, I would guess, less widely read, taught, and anthologized than those of his two friends and contemporaries Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman—a judgment, if that is what it is, that would have astonished serious readers of poetry between the 1950s and the 1970s.

More here.

Rossella Lorenzi at Discovery:

A life-sized statue of the 13th Dynasty Pharaoh Neferhotep I has emerged from the ruins of ancient Thebes in Luxor, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Saturday.

Buried for almost 3,600 years, the six-foot limestone statue shows the “beautiful and good” pharaoh — this is what Neferhotep means — wearing the royal head cloth.

The forehead bears the emblem of a cobra, which pharaohs wore on the crown as a protective symbol: they believed that the cobra would spit fire at enemies.

More here.

Steven Morris in The Guardian:

A British explorer has discovered an abandoned 19th-century submarine which may have been the inspiration for Captain Nemo’s vessel Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Colonel John Blashford-Snell found the cast-iron submarine, named Explorer, half-submerged in three metres of water off the coast of Panama.

Like Nautilus, the craft is cigar-shaped and has a lock-out system, which allows submariners to leave, collect items from the seabed and then return to the vessel.

It was built in 1864, five years before Verne’s classic adventure story was published, and it is thought that the French writer would have read about the sub’s specifications.

More here.

Cornelia Dean in the New York Times:

When people think about natural hazards, they usually think about tornadoes or hurricanes or earthquakes. But there is another natural hazard that takes more lives in an average year in the United States than any of those – rip currents.

Each year in American waters, rip currents pull about 100 panicked swimmers to their deaths. According to the United States Lifesaving Association, lifeguards pull out at least 70,000 Americans from the surf each year, 80 percent from rip currents.

Because these drownings and near drownings occur one by one, year-round, up and down the coasts, few people recognize rip currents as a major hazard. Only in recent years have meteorologists and coastal geologists begun to measure rip currents precisely in the field and model them in detail in laboratory wave tanks.

More here.

From The London Times:

A heavy snowstorm shrouded London on December 28, 1598. Through it a group of men bristling with swords and axes closed in on a building in the city’s northern suburbs. The building was The Theatre — London’s oldest playhouse, once the scene of full-blooded dramas by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, but empty for the past two years since the Chamberlain’s Men whose base it was had quarrelled with their cantankerous landlord, Giles Allen. Now, while Allen unsuspectingly spent Christmas in the country, members of the troupe gathered to dismantle the playhouse which (unlike the leased land it stood upon) technically belonged to them. Carted away and ferried across the Thames, its timbers would be re-erected as a new theatre, The Globe. Among those taking part in this rushed and risky act of reclamation were the company’s star tragedian Richard Burbage, its celebrity-comic Will Kemp and its 35-year-old resident playwright William Shakespeare.

For Shakespeare the next 12 months would be momentous. 1599, James Shapiro compellingly displays, was his annus mirabilis: the year that, deepening and complicating his imagination, took him from outstanding accomplishment to unsurpassed genius. That genius, romantically disposed commentators such as Coleridge have maintained, was “of no age” but arose from “the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind”. Shapiro, who can be breathtakingly acute at fathoming Shakespeare’s mind, couldn’t disagree more. Shakespeare’s creativity, he contends, was decisively fuelled and fired by contemporary events — and never more so than in his four great artistic undertakings of 1599: the completing of Henry V, the writing of Julius Caesar and As You Like It, and the drafting of Hamlet.

More here.

A delightful interview with Maurice Sendak, the creator of Max, the child-Hero from “where the wild things are”. At 76, his most treasured possession is a collection of Micky Mouse memorabilia.

“Maurice Sendak looks kinda like a Wild Thing,” Ludden notes. “Curly hair on a balding head… a glint in the eye… yet a softening smile around the mouth.”

Read the highlights or simply listen to the interview.

From The Scientific American:

Rhesus monkeys possess a natural ability to match the number of voices they hear to the number of individuals they expect to see vocalizing, new research concludes. The results indicate that abstract representation of numbers is possible in the absence of language.

Writing in the June 7 Current Biology, Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University and her colleagues describe their experiment. The researchers played the monkeys “coo” calls made by either two or three unfamiliar conspecifics. They then let the monkeys watch their choice of video images showing either two or three animals. The vast majority of the monkeys selected video images that corresponded to the number of individuals heard on the audio sample. Each monkey was tested only once and did not receive a reward. This allowed the team to observe the animal’s spontaneous behavior, as opposed to skills learned over the course of evaluation. Brannon notes that in the wild, a monkey could conceivably hear various animals calling but not see them. “In a territorial dispute, you could imagine that an animal would want to know, ‘Well, how many animals are really about to encroach on our territory?'”

More here.

From MSNBC:

A group of dolphins living off the coast of Australia apparently teach their offspring to protect their snouts with sponges while foraging for food in the sea floor. Researchers say it appears to be a cultural behavior passed on from mother to daughter, a first for animals of this type, although such learning has been seen in other species. The dolphins, living in Shark Bay, Western Australia, use conically shaped whole sponges that they tear off the bottom, said Michael Kruetzen, lead author of a report on the dolphins in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

“Cultural evolution, including tool use, is not only found in humans and our closest relatives, the primates, but also in animals that are evolutionally quite distant from us. This convergent evolution is what is so fascinating,” said Kruetzen. Researchers suspect the sponges help the foraging dolphins avoid getting stung by stonefish and other critters that hide in the sandy sea bottom, just as a gardener might wear gloves to protect the hands.

[The photo was taken by Dr. Janet Mann. The dolphin’s name is Dodger and she was taught to sponge by her mother, Demi. Demi’s mom, Half fluke, was also a sponger.]

More here.

And by way of Steven Levitt:

“The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America’s name choices. Start with a ‘sea’ of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you’ll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name’s changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.”

And there you’ll also find some interesting pieces on name-onomics.

“Levitt’s primary thesis is that fashions which originate with the upper classes gradually trickle down the economic ladder. This, naturally, is no revelation — in fashion-based industries like apparel, it’s an explicit, institutionalized process.  .  . Levitt uses data about California parents’ economic status and name choices to propose a list of names that, ‘unlikely as it seems,’ are candidates to become ‘mainstream names’ ten years from now. . .

In fact, of his 24 predictions for ‘unlikely’ names that could possibly hit the mainstream in a decade, 7 were already top-100 names, including 2 of the top 15 (Emma and Grace). Looking boldly out into the future, he predicted the present. Oops. So much for revelations.”

The first installment of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new New York Times Magazine column, “Freakanomics”, looks at what happens to moneys when they monetize exchange.

“The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it. . . It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

Then Chen introduced price shocks and wealth shocks. If, for instance, the price of Jell-O fell (two cubes instead of one per token), would the capuchin buy more Jell-O and fewer grapes? The capuchins responded rationally to tests like this — that is, they responded the way most readers of The Times would respond. In economist-speak, the capuchins adhered to the rules of utility maximization and price theory: when the price of something falls, people tend to buy more of it.

. . .

Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them — a combination jailbreak and bank heist — which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced [the researcher Keith] Chen of the monkeys’ true grasp of money. . . What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)”

You can also read their blog here.

With all the recent interest in Felt and Nixon, it’s a good time to mention an excellent web site, WhiteHouseTapes.org, which acts as a clearinghouse for Presidential audio archives. The project, associated with the University of Virginia, has some timely clips of Nixon on Felt. Of the main page’s features, check out the FBI background check on Janet Leigh, and Nixon discussing one Donald Rumsfeld.

Michelle Thaller in the Christian Science Monitor:

For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists (myself included) has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings.

After the 1989 announcement of fusion in a bottle, so to speak, and the subsequent retraction, the whole idea of cold fusion seemed a bit beyond the pale. But that’s all about to change.

A very reputable, very careful group of scientists at the University of Los Angeles (Brian Naranjo, Jim Gimzewski, Seth Putterman) has initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that’s not much bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room temperature. This time, it looks like the real thing.

More here.

From the AFP:

A previously unknown novel by the author of “The Three Musketeers”, Alexandre Dumas — a 1,000-page adventure story about the start of the Napoleonic empire — hit French bookstores.

“Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine” (The Knight of Sainte-Hermine) first appeared in serial form in a French newspaper and lacked just a few chapters when Dumas died in 1870.

Claude Schopp, the Dumas expert who found the book at France’s National Library, has added a short section to bring the tale to its conclusion.

The novel completes a trilogy of works set in the aftermath of the French revolution, which begins with “Les Compagnons de Jehu” — written in 1857 — and continues with “Les Blancs et Les Bleus,” completed in 1867.

More here.

John Freeman in The Scotsman:

For the past year, however, Rushdie’s professional attentions have been focused on his role as president of PEN/America, which entails not just putting on fancy events but filing legal action. Mention the US government’s attempt to ban literature from countries like Iran to him now and he immediately switches into policy wonk mode.

“PEN has been fighting that particular regulation for a long time,” he says and then explains some of its details. “The US government is just now beginning to plane back on it. The question is whether the damage is already done.”

It seems somewhat ironic that Rushdie should survive a period of life-threatening danger, living in 30 houses in nine years, and wind up in the land of the free only to discover that he must start campaigning for freedom all over again.

If there is resentment, though, he certainly doesn’t show it. Rushdie has lived part-time in New York for more than five years now, and he’s not about to stop. He can at least now freely play table tennis with fellow author Jonathan Safran Foer without first greeting photographers outside.

More here.

Pity (and praise) the poor intern or assistant whose job it is to put The Paris Review author interviews online. Then settle in for the fine experience of what TPR rather dramatically calls “The DNA of Literature,” a vast pdf archive of material stretching from the 1950s to the present, from Algren to Auster. Yet another nice feature of the TPR site – the Audio Index feature which allows you to hear work read by the author.

From Science:

Of all its accomplishments, the West is perhaps most proud of its scientific revolution, which has been unfolding for the past half millennium. Only students of history remain consistently mindful of the pivotal and catalytic role that the Arab world played in the early phases of this revolution. Now, all of us should have a vested interest in advancing science and technology in the Arab community. Science and technology provide the means to feed people, improve their health, and create wealth. They can help to reduce societal tensions and build international bridges for badly needed dialogue and mutual understanding. To usher science and technology more thoroughly into Arab culture and society, however, the West needs to acknowledge the Arab world’s historical contributions, and the Arab world needs to stop dwelling on its golden past by also embracing lessons about science and technology that the West learned long ago.

In medieval Europe, where the Christian dogma that the world unfolded according to a divinely predetermined plan prevailed, there was little space for those willing and eager to understand nature in order to use it for their own benefit. Beginning in the 11th century, the ailing Arab provinces in Spain (Al-Andalus) were falling to European armies, and with them came priceless spoils that changed the world: the epic intellectual achievement of Arab-Islamic scholars since the 8th century. Flourishing libraries in cities like Toledo and Cordoba contained thousands of books on every field of knowledge. Unlike the Moguls, who in the 13th century destroyed Baghdad and its libraries, thereby abruptly ending the golden era of the Arab-Islamic civilization, the Europeans were quick to realize the value of these windfalls of knowledge.

More here.