Paper by Michael S. Franklin and Michael J. Zyphur in Evolutionary Psychology:

This paper presents an evolutionary argument for the role of dreams in the development of human cognitive processes. While a theory by Revonsuo (2000) proposes that dreams allow for threat rehearsal and therefore provide an evolutionary advantage, the goal of this paper is to extend this argument by commenting on other fitness-enhancing aspects of dreams. Rather than a simple threat rehearsal mechanism, it is argued that dreams reflect a more general virtual rehearsal mechanism that is likely to play an important role in the development of human cognitive capacities. This paper draws on current work in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind in developing the argument.

More here.

Simon Jeffery in The Guardian:

The American feminist icon, writer and campaigner Andrea Dworkin, who linked pornography to rape and violence, died at the weekend, her agent said today. She was 59 years old.

Her radical-feminist critique of pornography began with her first book, Woman Hating, published when she was 27. She campaigned frequently on the subject, helping to draft a law in 1983 that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women.

More here.

James Gleick reviews a biography of Oppenheimer in the Washington Post:

The atomic bomb would surely have come into existence without Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project, but the label “Father of the Bomb” could be attached to no one else. He felt his responsibility deeply. His self-lacerating conscience let him see with immediate and lasting clarity what his success meant for humanity. If he had done nothing else — if nothing else had happened to him — Oppenheimer would still be one of the 20th century’s great, complex, defining figures.

More here.

From American Scientist:

With the crowd going wild and sweat pouring from your every pore, you have to concentrate on the ball that is about to be launched in your direction. You must gather as much information about the pitch as quickly as you can in order to make crucial decisions.

As we will show, you get just a few hundreds of milliseconds to figure out what kind of pitch—perhaps traveling at almost 100 miles per hour—is heading toward the plate. In that instant, you must observe the ball’s spin and predict how it will move on its way to the plate. It’s a daunting computational task. Luckily, we can describe a few clues for you to use. And you will need them soon, because that fearsome pitcher is rocking back on his pivot leg. In a split second, his arm will swing through a great arc and send a baseball hurtling your way.

More here.

In the Village Voice:

With some high-profile releases in the past few years, increased press coverage, and tourist-friendly phenomena like Bombay Dreams, the Bollywood brand is quickly finding its place in American pop culture’s mainstream masala. Now, two uptown series attempt to flesh out the recent history of Indian cinema. Lincoln Center fetes mega-luminary Amitabh Bachchan, touted record-book-style as “the biggest film star in the world.” The title of Bachchan’s tribute is inspired by a 1999 BBC online poll that named him Superstar of the Millennium. Bachchan bested not only Sir Laurence Olivier and Charlie Chaplin but presumably Sarah Bernhardt and David Garrick; Bachchan’s sheer number of film roles—almost 150 since his debut in 1969—was no doubt a decisive factor. In his first hit, the violent revenge narrative Zanjeer (1973), the towering, baritone-voiced actor established the model for his later on-screen persona: the “angry young man” who takes on the powerful and unscrupulous but displays a charismatic decorum between smackdowns. In keeping with Bollywood’s market-friendly smorgasbordism, Bachchan served as Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, and Sylvester Stallone rolled into one.

More here.

Max Rodenbeck in the New York Review of Books:

An extraordinary passion play has been unfolding in Beirut over the last few weeks. It is a drama that happens to pit forces which, in a particularly stark fashion, seem to represent the competing narratives that will ultimately define the Arabs’ vision of their recent past and soon-to-be-revealed destiny.

More here.

Tracy Staedter at the Discovery Channel:

A physics class competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., has students making art out of invisible forces.

The Weird Fields contest, part of the undergraduate course “Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism,” — encourages students to use a special computer program that converts mathematical formulas into visual representations of electromagnetic fields.

The resulting swirls, loops, circles and squares, while not necessarily corresponding exactly to those occurring in nature, offer a creative way to understand some of the most abstract concepts in physics.

More here.

From USA Today:

The American poet laureate, appointed by the librarian of Congress, does not write poems on public events like his British counterpart, who is appointed for life. He performs a minimum of official duties so he can pursue his own ideas to promote poetry.

Kooser’s idea was to offer a free weekly poem to U.S. newspapers. The second poem, Jonathan Greene’s “At the Grave”, was posted Thursday on the program’s Web site, http://americanlifeinpoetry.org/

More here.  Read some Kooser poems here, like:

From American Scientist:

The death of the last of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century concluded an intellectual movement in the study of evolution—a point of view whose most striking aspect was the extent to which all of the evolutionary history of life on Earth was perceived as a subdiscipline of biology. Whereas Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have called it a paradigm, Ludwik Fleck (author of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 1935) would have recognized the correlated demise of neo-Darwinism and the death of Professor Mayr as a paradigm lost.

An accomplished naturalist, Ernst Mayr began his work in 1923 at the age of 19. The last of his 25 books, a collection of essays called What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline, was published by Cambridge University Press in the summer of 2004, one month after his 100th birthday!

More here.

Susannah Clapp in The Observor:

  Bringing the ancient Greeks closer to us is probably the only cultural achievement of the war in Iraq. The translation of the play’s action into the 21st century is more or less seamless: the chorus of lamenting women could be the background to the report of an atrocity; the cycle of revenge, with its bloody display of children’s bodies, now looks almost routine.

The case is clear and there’s no need for Harrison’s translation – fleshy, forthright, always robust, but sometimes overdone – to thump down every modern parallel. A few nods in the direction of the here and now work well: triumphant Greeks swagger about the coalition’s plans; there’s a lament about the price paid for democracy. These signals would have been enough. Darrell D’Silva’s otherwise powerful Odysseus takes things too far with his intermittent George Dubya accent.

And there is Vanessa Redgrave. You see the outlines of what she can do here and the uniqueness of what she does.

More here.

Nancy Morris in The American Heritage:

From the observation deck of the Aloha Tower there is a panoramic view of the Honolulu waterfront and a once infamous district known as Iwilei. Looking for local color, Somerset Maugham went slumming there and wrote this in his notebook: “You go down side-streets by the harbour, in the darkness, across a rickety bridge, and you come to a road, all ruts and holes; a little farther … there is a certain stir, an air of expectant agitation; you turn down a narrow alley, either to the right or to the left, and find yourself in the district… . The pretty bungalows are divided into two lodgings; each is inhabited by a woman, and each consists of two rooms and a kitchenette.”

A prostitute named Sadie Thompson, Maugham was to find, lived in one of those bungalows. Shortly after Maugham’s Iwilei adventure, the police shut down the district. Sadie was out of business and sailed off to Samoa. As it turned out, Maugham was on board that ship too and suffered through her loud gramophone and late-night trysts. In Samoa, temporarily stranded by a storm, he found himself in the same boardinghouse as Sadie. There was a reallife hypocritical missionary staying in the boardinghouse too, although he seems not to have met the final grim end of Maugham’s character Davidson. Sadie’s adventures became Maugham’s most famous short story, “Rain.” The writer did not even bother to change her name: Passenger lists published in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser record a “Somerset Maugham” and a “Miss Thompson” departing Honolulu for Pago Pago on the Sonoma, December 4, 1916.

More here.

From the BBC:

The United Arab Emirates says it will use robots as jockeys for camel races from next season.

The move comes after widespread international criticism of the use of young children to ride camels during the long and often hazardous races.

Officials say a prototype of the robot was successfully tested on Saturday.

Aid workers say there are up to 40,000 child jockeys working across the Gulf. Many are said to be have been kidnapped and trafficked from South Asia.

More here.  [Thanks to Alan Koenig.]

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

On July 9, 1985, a thirty-year-old American economist named Jeffrey Sachs stepped off a plane in La Paz, Bolivia, high in the Andes, where the inflation rate was three thousand per cent. Prices were rising so fast that on the streets of the capital people were frantically trading bags of depreciating pesos for dollars. Sachs, one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of the Harvard economics department, had established himself as an authority on inflation and international finance, and was someone who, in his own words, “thought that I knew just about everything that needed to be known” about his subject.

It was Sachs’s self-confidence that had earned him an invitation to Latin America. A few months earlier, during a seminar at Harvard on the Bolivian crisis organized by some Latin-American students, he had interrupted the speaker, strode to the blackboard, and announced, “Here’s how it works.” When he finished scribbling equations, a voice at the back of the room said, “Well, if you’re so smart, why don’t you come down to La Paz to help us?” Sachs laughed, but the speaker, Carlos Iturralde, a Bolivian businessman who later became his country’s foreign minister, wasn’t joking. Seven weeks after Sachs arrived in La Paz, some of his recommendations were implemented, and three years of hyperinflation came to an immediate end.

More here.

James Shreeve in the New York Times Magazine:

To test the potential curative powers of human embryonic stem cells, biologists want to inject them into lab animals. Creating such chimeras makes perfect sense, to a point: A sheep with a human liver? O.K. A mouse brain made up of human cells? Maybe. But a chimp that sobs?

More here.

Liz Else interviews Clare Shaw, author of Cancer: The power of food, in New Scientist:

As a child in Blackpool, Clare Shaw loved fish and chips, and her mother’s good old-fashioned cooking. Her first degree was in nutrition and dietetics at the University of London. And she stayed in London for her first job at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, working in general dietetics. She joined the Royal Marsden cancer hospital in 1987, and went on to become chief dietitian there in 1992. Her book Cancer: The power of food has just been published by Hamlyn.

Has science needed some persuading of the relationship between diet and cancer?

Yes. Conclusive evidence has been very hard to get, which made them cautious about false messages or easy sound bites. As a result they have been rather behind in talking to the public.

What do you think about the quality of advice out there about food and cancer?

A lot of the information that is aimed at the general public is not necessarily based on good scientific evidence. People find it difficult to know what is reliable and what is really just someone’s idea, just spin. Lots of people think they know about diet, so they’re all jumping on the bandwagon. Often messages about healthy eating do not fit politically with what everyone wants, whether that be the food industry, government or whomever.

More here, including a short guide for better eating.

Paul Boutin in Slate:

Thanks to the ruthless hippies who run local politics, the Presidio’s former Army barracks are filled by nonprofits rather than condos. Search-engine wiz and dot-com multimillionaire Brewster Kahle founded the archive here in 1996 with a dream as big as the bridge: He wanted to back up the Internet. There were only 50 million or so URLs back then, so the idea only seemed half-crazy. As the Web ballooned to more than 10 billion pages, the archive’s main server farm—hidden across town in a data center beneath the city’s other big bridge—grew to hold a half-million gigabytes of compressed and indexed pages.

Kahle is less the Internet’s crazy aunt—the tycoon who can’t stand to throw anything away—than its evangelical librarian. “The history of digital materials in companies’ hands is one of … loss,” he tells me in a rushed meeting. Like it or not, the Web is the world’s library now, and Kahle doesn’t trust the guys who shelve the books. They’re obsessed with posting new pages, not preserving old ones. Every day, Kahle laments, mounds of data get purged from the Web: government documents, personal sites, corporate communications, message boards, news reports that weren’t printed on paper. For most surfers, once a page disappears from Google’s cache it no longer exists.

More here.

Elisabeth Sifton in Slate:

When the Viking Press published Mr. Sammler’s Planet in the fall of 1971, I happened to be the new kid on the Viking editorial block. I guess all of us knew, and I learned quickly, that the great man liked to read proofs in-house when he could, turning up to attend to this or that when he was in New York in the peri-publication period. Since he revised his texts heavily in the late stages (sometimes with up to four sets of proofs), he was around plenty.

The final revisions were astounding. “Look at this,” said a colleague, an editor who greatly admired Bellow’s novels but disliked him personally. He was keeping an eye on the proofs of Mr. Sammler’s Planet during the brief summer absence of Bellow’s then-editor, Aaron Asher. He threw down on my desk a single long sheet from the second chapter, with scrawled lines defacing a paragraph at the top and new phrases and clauses sprouting at the end, all this in a clear, decisive hand and bright black ink. “Just read that,” he repeated. “Read it! He took a perfect sentence, the bastard, and he made it even better.” In the summer of 1973, when I was assigned to be Saul Bellow’s editor for his forthcoming books—the first was Humboldt’s Gift—I had scarcely talked to him, but he nailed me as his co-conspirator in the work to be done, and we plunged in. I kept him company while he pawed through the many drafts, options, and alternatives of a fiction that, I learned, he’d been concocting for years.

More here.

And Michiko Kakutani has a short piece on Bellow in the NYT here.

And Philip Roth had a piece in 2000 on Bellow in the New Yorker here.

John Ballard writes about this story from Wired:

Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It’s a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

More here.

Marie Arana for the Washington Post:

Spring is here, and books, like plants, are emerging in clumps, as if the seeds of a few notions had proliferated madly during winter. Last year saw a remarkable run of novels written as memoirs: Ha Jin’s War Trash, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Ward Just’s An Unfinished Season. Clearly the memoir, which had so dominated nonfiction shelves during the past decade, broke free and penetrated novelists’ imaginations. This year, the dominant idea continues to be 9/11, which has fueled nonfiction books since 2001 but now spreads copiously into the realm of the novel. In his latest work, Saturday, Ian McEwan gives us a portrait of a beleaguered neurosurgeon in nervous, post-9/11 London. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer imagines a precocious boy whose father is lost in the conflagration of the twin towers. We will see more on this theme as the year progresses: The Writing on the Wall, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz; The Good Priest’s Son, by Reynolds Price; A Little Love Story, by Roland Merullo; Incendiary, by Chris Cleave; and many others. Here is a list of books you may find reviewed in our spring and summer pages. Look to our reviewers to tell you the rest.

NON-FICTION

Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, by Brooke Shields (Hyperion, May). A celebrity’s bout with a syndrome that affects millions.

Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon, April). From the author of the comic-strip memoir Persepolis, a foray into the private lives of Iranian women.

A Lotus Grows in the Mud, by Goldie Hawn (Putnam, May). An ugly duckling grows up to become America’s darling.

No Mountain High Enough : Raising Lance, Raising Me, by Linda Armstrong Kelly (Broadway, April). A pregnant teenager, banished from home, becomes the mother of the indefatigable Lance Armstrong.

Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey (Penguin, May). The founding editor of McSweeney’s tells of his zany childhood among the rich and famous.

FICTION

Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo (Knopf, May). First world meets third, in this story about relief workers trying to reverse the famine in Sudan, by the author of A Rumor of War.

Alibi, by Joseph Kanon (Holt, April). In post-World War II Venice, a war crimes investigator falls in love with an enigmatic woman and finds himself implicated in a violent murder.

The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman, by Nedjma (Grove, June). A young widow tells the secrets of her erotic life in this presumably autobiographical novel.

More here.

Brian Hayes in the American Scientist:

The story begins with a loose end from my column on the Lambert W function in the March-April issue of American Scientist. I had been looking for a paper with the curious title “Rumours with general initial conditions,” by Selma Belen and C. E. M. Pearce of the University of Adelaide, published in The ANZIAM Journal, which is also known as The Australia and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal.

“The stochastic theory of rumours, with interacting subpopulations of ignorants, spreaders and stiflers, began with the seminal paper of Daley and Kendall. The most striking result in the area—that if there is one spreader initially, then the proportion of the population never to hear the rumour converges almost surely to a proportion 0.203188 of the population size as the latter tends to infinity—was first signalled in that article. This result occurs also in the variant stochastic model of Maki and Thompson, although a typographic error has resulted in the value 0.238 being cited in a number of consequent papers”.

I was intrigued and a little puzzled to learn that a rumor would die out while “almost surely” leaving a fifth of the people untouched. Why wouldn’t it reach everyone eventually? And that number 0.203188, with its formidable six decimal places of precision—where did that come from? I read on far enough to get the details of the models. The premise, I discovered, is that rumor-mongering is fun only if you know the rumor and your audience doesn’t; there’s no thrill in passing on stale news. In terms of the three subpopulations, people remain spreaders of a rumor as long as they continue to meet ignorants who are eager to receive it; after that, the spreaders become stiflers, who still know the rumor but have lost interest in propagating it.

Read more here.