Our old friend Kent Puckett has been working on an online Dictionary of Sensibility (with a number of collaborators, of course).  An example of an entry, “Delicacy/Modesty”:

“Like ‘sensibility’ itself, ‘delicacy’ has two interwoven frames of reference that complicate and enrich its significance. There is ‘delicacy of constitution’ and ‘delicacy of mind,’ ‘heart,’ or ‘soul;’ and each of these facets of meaning informs the other. Thus, delicacy can describe a physical sensitivity, on the one hand–an exceptional susceptiblity to stimuli from the senses–or it can indicate a sensitivity (often gendered female) to social or ethical punctilios.

The refinement inherent in ‘delicacy’ leads it sometimes to be opposed to ‘vulgarity.’ In this way the term takes on moral and socioeconomic associations as well.

‘Modesty’ seems less complex, and often appears as an epiphenomenon of delicacy.

• George Cheyne, An Essay on Health and Long Life
  Cheyne comments on three types of sensibility.
• J. Donaldson, Reflections on the Harmony of Sensibility and Reason
  Draws connections between sensibility, vitality, and moral nature.
• David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste”
  Defines delicacy in the course of his search for universal standards of judgment.
• Henry Mackenzie, Untitled Article in The Lounger, No. 20
  Attacks the sentimental novel on moral grounds.
• Hannah More, “On the Danger of Sentimental or Romantic Connexions”
  Criticizes the “sentimental girl,” but praises “true” sentiment in women.
• Samuel Richardson,Clarissa
  Clarissa on Lovelace’s proposal. .  .”

Andrew Rubin on Israel’s construction of the so-called security fence, in Al Ahram:

A comparison between the 1993 maps of the Oslo Accords and the existing plans for all three phases of the wall incontrovertibly shows that the wall is nothing less than the physical and concrete institutionalisation of precisely those aspects of Oslo that Israel had agreed to: the establishment of tiny cloisters and pockets of Palestinian self-rule, with no meaningful sovereignty, that Edward Said compared to the bantustans which the British had devised as a means of exerting colonial authority in Africa. Yet the comparison with British form of colonial rule ends with the establishment of numerous, non-contiguous bantustans. Whereas from 1918-1948 in British Mandate Palestine, Britain had dredged and designed the Port of Haifa, constructed six power stations for Palestinians and Jews, built public roads and buildings for everyone, all Israel has done is to shore up its military presence with more check-points, more prisons, more expanding settlements, more rerouted irrigation systems (for the settlements), more de- development (of Palestinian infrastructure and agriculture), more barriers and more of its massive $3.4 billion wall. In others words, it is colonialism without development, or “de-development” as Sara Roy called it, the sole aim of which is the complete destruction of the foundations of all aspects of Palestinian civil society.

More here.

From New Scientist:

If you think the complex microchips that drive modern computers are models of deterministic precision, think again. Their behaviour is inherently unpredictable and chaotic, a property one normally associates with the weather.

Intel’s widely used Pentium 4 microprocessor has 42 million transistors and the newer Itanium 2 has no fewer than 410 million. “Their performance can be highly variable and difficult to predict,” says Hugues Berry of the National Research Institute for Information and Automation in Orsay, France.

Berry, Daniel Perez and Olivier Temam say that chaos theory can explain the unpredictable behaviour. The team ran a standard program repeatedly on a simulator which engineers routinely use to design and test microprocessors, and found that the time taken to complete the task varied greatly from one run to the next.

But within the irregularity, the team detected a pattern, the mathematical signature of “deterministic chaos”, a property that governs other chaotic systems such as weather.

More here.

Michael Schirber at Space.com:

“The idea is to try to answer the question of what does a black hole look like,” said David Kornreich. 

The simple answer is “black” because light cannot escape the gravitational pull of a black hole.  But light traveling just outside a black hole will be bent — similar to what happens in a lens.

Kornreich and his student Bryant Gipson have figured out how images of landscapes and planets would be distorted by having a black hole sitting in the foreground. 

Such mathematical calculations have been done before for stationary black holes, but this is the first time it has been done for spinning black holes, Kornreich told SPACE.com.  Most black holes in the universe are thought to be rotating — many at high speeds.

In a stellar black hole, which forms when a giant star dies explosively, the rotation is a logical remnant of the star’s spin. Just as a skater speeds up when she pulls her arms in, the dead star’s rotation picks up dramatically as remaining material collapses into a small, dense black hole.

More here.

Paula Fredriksen reviews Augustine: A New Biography by James J. O’Donnell, in The New Republic:

It is hard to love Augustine. He stands as the source of some of the most baleful traditions of thought in Western culture. All humans, he held, are born indelibly marked, indelibly marred, by original sin. Human desire, especially sexual desire, is a premier sign and effect of Adam’s fall. Unbaptized babies go to hell. Salvation is a question not of human effort, but of divine predestination. The church, to propound spiritual truth and to protect it, should avail itself of the coercive power of the state. These are all Augustinian teachings.

And yet it is hard not to love Augustine. He states his questions and his convictions about the human condition with such ardor that the flames of his ideas leap across the chasm of sixteen centuries from his lifetime into our own.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering from bypass surgery when he first heard the music. It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard everything from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. “I asked the nurses if they could hear the music, and they said no,” said Mr. King, a retired sales manager in Cardiff, Wales. Last year, Mr. King was referred to Dr. Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at St. Cadoc’s Hospital in Wales.

Dr. Aziz explained to him that there was a name for his experience: musical hallucinations.

More here.

Op-ed from the New York Times:

…Now comes even worse news. Whatever Pakistan can do, India, it seems, can trump. The so-called Imrana case, in which a Muslim woman from a village in northern India says she was raped by her father-in-law, has brought forth a ruling from the powerful Islamist seminary Darul-Uloom ordering her to leave her husband because as a result of the rape she has become “haram” (unclean) for him. “It does not matter,” a Deobandi cleric has stated, “if it was consensual or forced.”

Darul-Uloom, in the village of Deoband 90 miles north of Delhi, is the birthplace of the ultra-conservative Deobandi cult, in whose madrassas the Taliban were trained. It teaches the most fundamentalist, narrow, puritan, rigid, oppressive version of Islam that exists anywhere in the world today. In one fatwa it suggested that Jews were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Not only the Taliban but also the assassins of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were followers of Deobandi teachings.

Darul-Uloom’s rigid interpretations of Shariah law are notorious, and immensely influential – so much so that the victim, Imrana, a woman under unimaginable pressure, has said she will abide by the seminary’s decision in spite of the widespread outcry in India against it. An innocent woman, she will leave her husband because of his father’s crime.

More here.

From the AFP:

He emerged in the 1950s as a leading exponent of the nouveau roman, or “new novel”, writing in a style characterised by interior monologues and an absence of punctuation.

His works include “Le Tricheur” (The Trickster, 1945), “Le Vent” (The Wind, 1959) and “La Route des Flandres (The Road to Flanders, 1960).

His publishing house, Editions de Minuit, said he died on Wednesday and was buried in Paris on Saturday.

Born on October 10, 1913, in Antananarivo, Madagascar, which was then a French colony, he went on to study in Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.

Simon was just 10 years old when his mother died and he was sent to live with his grandmother in the southern French city of Perpignan. His father had been killed in World War I, a year after he was born.

More here.

JR Minkel interviews David J. Buller in Scientific American:

Philosopher of science David Buller has a bone to pick with evolutionary psychology, the idea that some important human behaviors are best explained as evolutionary adaptations to the struggles we faced tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago as hunter-gatherers. In his new book, Adapting Minds, the Northern Illinois University professor considers–and finds lacking–the evidence for some of the most publicized conclusions of evolutionary psychologists: Men innately prefer to mate with young, nubile women, while women have evolved to seek high status men; men are wired to have a strong jealous reaction to sexual infidelity, while women react to emotional infidelity; and parents are more likely to abuse stepchildren than their genetically related children.

More here.

Peter Wilby reviews Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays by Christopher Hitchens, in The New Statesman:

Many left-wing opponents of the Iraq war will therefore want this collection to be bad: full of windbaggery, loose judgements, bad writing, and so on. Hitchens was never that good, was he? We on the left can manage without him, can’t we? Alas, no. Hitchens is just too damn good. You will find here the most brilliant anti-capital punishment piece you have ever read; the most thoughtful piece on Israel and anti-Semitism; a marvellously vivid report on North Korea (“I found a class of tiny Koreans solemnly learning Morse code . . . Nobody has told them that the international community abandoned Morse two years ago”); a hilarious account of how Hitchens gave evidence to a Vatican commission on the beatification of Mother Teresa; and a gloriously rude demolition of Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11.

More here.  And if you missed it, check out J.M. Tyree’s brilliant dressing down of The Hitch here.

This story may be a bit newsy for 3QD, but it’s important to note that it is the 10th anniversary of one of more sad and shameful events in UN and post-War European history, the massacre at the UN safe haven in Srebrenica.  From the BBC:

“Tens of thousands of people have been attending ceremonies marking the 10th anniversary of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.

Grieving relatives buried more than 600 newly identified dead, after prayers and words of support from international and local officials.

About 8,000 men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995 in Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

Serbian officials led by President Tadic paid respects for the first time.”

Radovan Karazic and Ratko Maldic, wanted for genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws and customs of war, remain at large. 

‘If you’re going to name a book after units of time, you’d better have something to say on the subject, and in ”A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer,” Christine Schutt certainly does. Whether or not readers will find her voice comforting is another matter.’

So begins David Kirby’s NYT review (Reg Req’d) of Schutt’s new collection of stories. LitBlog Beatrice rightly noted that NYT completely missed Schutt’s work until her novel Florida was nominated for the National Book Award.

One further remark. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been reading a lot of Faulkner recently to try to keep up with the Oprah Book Club, but I have to ask…Since when is literature supposed to be comforting? Mr. Kirby, meet The Idiot.

From The New York Times:

Dr. Taimina, a math researcher at Cornell University, started crocheting the objects so her students could visualize something called hyperbolic space, which is an advanced geometric shape with constant negative curvature. Say what? Well, balls and oranges, for example, have constant positive curvature. A flat table has zero curvature. And some things, like ruffled lettuce leaves, sea slugs and cancer cells, have negative curvatures. This is not some abstract – or frightening – math lesson. Hyperbolic space is useful to many professionals – engineers, architects and landscapers, among others. So Dr. Taimina expected some attention for her yarn work, especially from math students destined for those professions. But her work has recently drawn interest from crocheting enthusiasts.

More here.

From National Geographic:

Many deep-sea creatures use blue or green luminescent light to defend themselves, but this relative of the jellyfish has twitching appendages that glow red—apparently to lure fish to their death. Steven Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and his colleagues collected three Erenna specimens off the coast of California during a deep-sea dive in a submersible. The animals, which cannot themselves see, belong to a new species of siphonophores, the group that includes jellyfish and corals. They are the first marine invertebrates known to produce red luminescent light, and they’re all the more surprising because researchers have generally believed that deep-sea animals can’t detect red light.

More here.

“Ten years ago, at the age of 42, observer literary editor Robert McCrum suffered a devastating stroke which left him paralysed down his left side. during his extended convalescence, he wrote a memoir. It was meant to close the door on his illness, but instead it opened another into a parallel world of other people’s pain.”

From The Guardian:

Is it for our 10 fingers that we think in decades? The Twenties for jazz and the great crash; the Sixties for sex and flower power; the Eighties for greed; some decades stick out like a sore thumb. Others make no impression. I have my own millennial decade. It doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the sight of eternity, but it means a lot to me. Ten years ago, I could look at my hands resting in front of me on the bedsheet, but not count beyond five. Ten years ago, my left side – hand, foot, arm and leg – was paralysed, lifeless. I was recovering from a stroke. Most doctors who looked at me said I could expect years, even decades, of immobility, possibly in a wheelchair. At the time, I was quite grateful. According to the statistics, I was lucky to be alive. Of the 150,000 strokes that occur in Britain each year, one third are fatal. So 28 July 1995 is a date I won’t forget in a hurry. Ten years on it seems like a dream, a hallucination, or a nightmare. Occasionally, in the morning, I will wake and wonder, “Did it really happen?” But of course it did; I have what doctors call the ‘deficits’ to prove it. For me, amid all the late-Nineties talk of the millennium, the apocalypse came early.

More here.

Ed Harriman follows the auditors into Iraq. From the London Review of Books:

Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11 million and $26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work: $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for ‘personnel not in the field performing work’ and ‘other improper charges’ on a single oil pipeline repair contract. An Iraqi sports coach was paid $40,000 by the CPA. He gave it to a friend who gambled it away then wrote it off as a legitimate loss. ‘A complainant alleged that Iraqi Airlines was sold at a reduced price to an influential family with ties to the former regime. The investigation revealed that Iraqi Airlines was essentially dissolved, and there was no record of the transaction.’ Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPA-IG instigated related to alleged ‘theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion’. It also investigated ‘a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report’. At around this time, 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5 million, were found on a plane in Lebanon which had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister.

More here.

Last Friday night (yes, this is how we spend our weekends) Morgan asked Robin and me a question: is it true that hot water will freeze faster than cold water? Apparently, he had gotten into an argument with someone who pointed to the obvious absurdity of the statement, and Morgan couldn’t remember exactly why this is true, but did remember reading somewhere that it is in fact true. In a manner superior and smug enough to indicate my superior knowledge of physics, I informed Morgan that he was wrong, and as a reference, told him that I remember Cecil Adams tackling this silly myth in The Straight Dope column some years ago. Sure enough, a quick search of The Straight Dope archives revealed this:

Dear Cecil:

I have a friend who insists that filling an ice cube tray with warm water will cause the cubes to form more quickly than they would if you started with cold water. He said it had something to do with the air circulation around the trays being affected by the temperature.

Not knowing much about frigidity myself, but being contrary, not to mention skeptical, by nature, I expressed doubt. Cecil, was I right, or is there indeed some basis in fact for this foolishness? –Mary M.Q.C., Santa Barbarba, California

Cecil replies:

You were smart to let me handle this, Mary. God knows what would happen if you tried to experiment with ice cubes on your own.

Needless to say, I conducted my research in the calm and systematic manner that has long been the trademark of Straight Dope Labs. First, I finished off a half a pint of Haagen-Dazs I found in the fridge, in order to keep my brain supplied with vital nutrients.

Then I carefully measured a whole passel of water into the Straight Dope tea kettle and boiled it for about five minutes. This was so I could compare the freezing rate of boiled H20 with that of regular hot water from the tap. (Somehow I had the idea that water that had been boiled would freeze faster.)

Finally I put equal quantities of each type into trays in the freezer, checked the temp (125 degrees Fahrenheit all around), and sat back to wait, timing the process with my brand new Swatch watch, whose precision and smart styling have made it the number one choice of scientists the world over.

I subsequently did the same with two trays of cold water, which had been chilled down to a starting temperature of 38 degrees.

The results? The cold water froze about 10 or 15 minutes faster than the hot water, and there was no detectable difference between the boiled water and the other kind. Another old wives’ tale thus emphatically bites the dust. Science marches on.

However, a reader wrote in to say that Scientific American had an article about why hot water freezes faster than cold, and old Unca Cecil had to revise his conclusion:

I know it must unnerve you to find that a supposedly infallible source of wisdom can make mistakes, so let me hasten to reassure you: Scientific American did not screw up. My results and theirs (specifically, those of Jearl Walker, author of SA’s “Amateur Scientist” column) are consistent–we were just working in different temperature ranges.

I found that cold water (38 degrees Fahrenheit) froze faster than hot water out of the tap (125 degrees F). I chose these two temperatures because (1) they were pretty much what the average amateur ice-cube maker would have readily available and (2) I couldn’t find a mercury thermometer that went higher than 125 degrees.

Jearl, who is not afflicted with penny-pinching editors like some of the rest of us, was able to get his mitts on a thermocouple that could measure as high as the boiling point, 212 degrees F. He found that water heated to, say, 195 degrees would freeze three to ten minutes faster than water at 140-175 degrees. (There were differences depending on how much water was used, where the thermocouple was placed, and so on.)

Jearl suggested that the most likely explanation for this was evaporation: when water cools down from near boiling to the freezing point, as much as 16 percent evaporates away, compared to 7 percent for water at 160 degrees. The smaller the amount of water, of course, the faster it freezes.

In addition, the water vapor carries away a certain amount of heat. To test this theory, Jearl covered his lab beaker with Saran Wrap to prevent water vapor from escaping. The freezing rate difference was greatly diminished. Conceivably convection (motion within the water) also plays a role.

Fascinating as all this no doubt is, all it basically proves is that very hot water freezes more slowly than very VERY hot water. The ordinary fumbler in the fridge, on the other hand, is dealing with temps more like the ones I was measuring, in which case cold freezes faster than hot. I rest my case.

You can see the Straight Dope page here. However, this is not the whole story either. Apparently the phenomenon in question is known as the Mpemba Effect after a Tanzanian high school student who discovered it in 1969. There is more to the story, and the possible mechanisms behind this anomalous effect here, here, here, here, and from Scientific American’s “Ask the Experts” column here.

My apologies to Morgan. (But I did double check. Can I get partial credit?)

Reuel Marc Gerecht in the New York Times Book Review:

Could the administration have chosen a different course in Iraq that would today have the country farther down the road to popular government and cost fewer lives? Two new books — among the first ”insider” accounts by former Iraq advisers — find the White House guilty of an incompetent occupation. Representative government may, just possibly, still take hold in Mesopotamia, but neither Larry Diamond, a researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who was called by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to temporary service in Baghdad in early 2004, nor David L. Phillips, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as an adviser to the State Department before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein, are at all optimistic.

More here.

The London bombings came as the G8 came together to discuss poverty in Africa.  Attention to that very serious issue also suffered as a result.  Jeffrey Sach’s blogged the G8 (and unexpectedly the bombing) for the FT.

“We have recently heard much, and much wrong, about the question of whether aid can actually deliver benefits to the poor. The sceptics claim that vast amounts of aid have gone down the drain. They cite alleged huge numbers, approximately $500 billion of total aid to Africa over 50 years, as “proof” of the failure of aid. They don’t recognize that a sum of aid flows added over 50 or more years will sound large though the annual aid per African has actually been quite small.

Just do the arithmetic. Aid to Africa has averaged perhaps $10 billion per year during the past half century ($500 billion divided by 50), shared among an average African population of roughly 400 million during this period, or approximately $25 per African per year in aid. Of that annual flow, well over half would typically come as emergency food aid and salaries of US and European consultants, rather than as actual investments in Africa. In recent years, another part of the “aid” has been exaggerated headline figures on debt cancellation, which greatly exaggerate the cash flow relief per year. Actual investments supported by the donor aid might have averaged say $5 to $10 per African per year, or even less.

This has not been nearly enough to address a continent profoundly vulnerable to deep and widespread drought, pervasive disease, huge overland transport costs with many landlocked countries, and a legacy of a century of colonialism that left a disastrously poor physical infrastructure and a shockingly low level of literacy and higher education at the time of African independence. Small aid flows per African per year ran up against uniquely large developmental needs.”

From Science:

Great cases, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested a century ago, may make bad law. But great questions often make very good science. Some great questions get bigger over time, encompassing an ever-expanding universe, or become more profound, such as the quest to understand consciousness. On the other hand, many deep questions drive science to smaller scales, more minute than the realm of atoms and molecules, or to a greater depth of detail underlying broad-brush answers to past big questions. In 1880, some scientists remained unconvinced by Maxwell’s evidence for atoms. Today, the analogous debate focuses on superstrings as the ultimate bits of matter, on a scale a trillion trillion times smaller. Old arguments over evolution and natural selection have descended to debates on the dynamics of speciation, or how particular behaviors, such as altruistic cooperation, have emerged from the laws of individual competition.

Science’s greatest advances occur on the frontiers, at the interface between ignorance and knowledge, where the most profound questions are posed. There’s no better way to assess the current condition of science than listing the questions that science cannot answer. “Science,” Gross declares, “is shaped by ignorance.”

More here.