From “The Assortive Mating Theory,” a talk with Simon Baron-Cohen at Edge.org:

My thesis with regard to sex differences is quite moderate, in that I do not discount environmental factors; I’m just saying, don’t forget about biology. To me that sounds very moderate. But for some people in the field of gender studies, even that is too extreme. They want it to be all environment and no biology. You can understand that politically that was an important position in the 1960s, in an effort to try to change society. But is it a true description, scientifically, of what goes on? It’s time to distinguish politics and science, and just look at the evidence.

Read more here, including responses by Marc D. Hauser and Steven Pinker.

A reader of this site recently sent me an email bringing up a couple of interesting points about the process by which a new pope will soon be chosen after John Paul II, arguably the most “mediatized” pope ever (see a related post by Joi Ito on his blog here). This is the first time that a new pope is being chosen in the age of the Internet. What might this mean for the process, if anything? She writes:

• The choice of the next pope–one of the most influential leaders in the world (spiritual leadership and influence over about 1 billion people)–is one of the least transparent processes around.
• 117 people get together in the Sistine chapel to decide on the new pope.
• 114 of the 117 were chosen by the just-deceased pope (indicating a lot of value convergence–and also a tendency towards conservatism). [You can read more about the process here at the BBC.]
• Little is known about the candidates (most of this information is available in scattered local media). No single (as far as is obvious) source exists to share this information with the broader public.
• The voting mechanism: 2/3 majority required, but under rules brought in by the previous pope, a simple majority can waive this rule and thereby a simple majority can vote in the next pope.
• Now suppose someone built (a) a wiki to pool information about the candidates and (b) an online and SMS feedback system to register the global point of view.
• If such a thing were to happen would this be a good thing for (a) the Roman Catholic church, (b) for the Christian community, (c) for the world?

I know very little about Roman Catholicism, but these seem like interesting things. I add some corollary questions below:

• Even if there is no room for anyone’s opinion but the presumably-divinely-chosen 117 in the actual election of a new pope, would it be possible to influence their opinions with a massive show of popular preference for one of the “papabili” (main candidates)?
• How can the internet be used (by the 117 themselves) to make the process of pope-selection more transparent to the public? Would they want it to be?
• Could the 117 make use of the internet to help them make their decision? By taking stock of public opinion, for example, or by inviting objections to a particular candidate’s election?
• Would more public involvement in the election of a new pope, even if just as spectator to the heretofore secretive processes of selection, contribute to greater commitment to the new pope, or might it have the opposite effect by demystifying the divine in some way?
• What are the theological details of catholicism which speak to these issues?

Richard Preston in The New Yorker:

Two mathematicians, seven medieval tapestries, and a supercomputer…

More here.

Review of The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy and the New Fundamentalism by Dick Taverne, from The Economist:

THIS cogent restating of the case for science, reason, optimism and the other values of the Enlightenment is clear about its opponents. They include anyone who uses alternative medicine, or who buys organic food, or worries about genetic modification, or opposes nuclear power, or likes post-modernism, or doesn’t vaccinate their children properly, or distrusts scientists, or believes the Bible, or dislikes global capitalism or thinks that human progress damages the environment. In Dick Taverne’s view, all these wrong-headed beliefs are part of the same batty, sentimental mindset that ultimately threatens democracy.

A former lawyer and centre-left politician who was ennobled in 1996, Lord Taverne presents a useful compendium of facts and arguments that are often drowned out by media scare stories and green propaganda. Alternative medicine is at best a placebo, and at worst outright harmful; if it worked reliably, it would not be alternative. Organic food is often worse for the environment than conventional farming. GM crops, by contrast, are hugely promising and rich western nations’ antipathy towards them is a mystifying bit of self-indulgence.

More here.

In the New York Times:

The 89th annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday. Following are the winners in Letters, Drama and Music.

FICTION: ‘Gilead,’ by Marilynne Robinson
This grave, lucid, luminously spiritual novel about fathers and sons reaches back to the abolitionist movement and into the 1950’s.
• Review (November 28, 2004)
• Excerpt
• Profile (New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2005)

GENERAL NONFICTION: ‘Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,’ by Steve Coll
A journalist’s history of how the anti-Soviet jihadist movement in Afghanistan evolved into the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
• Review (April 11, 2004)
• First Chapter
• Reading Group Discussion of ‘Ghost Wars’

More here.

From the BBC News:

A Pakistani newspaper vendor in Paris with a unique selling style has won a book deal to have his life story published.

Ali Akbar, who sells copies of Le Monde on the streets of the French capital’s fashionable St Germain des Pres district, arrived in the country as an illegal immigrant more than 30 years ago – leaving behind a tough childhood in Pakistan.

He then made a name for himself by the way he sold the newspapers, shouting amusing slogans, or making up headlines, such as “Monica [Lewinsky] is pregnant by Bush” or “Le Pen assassinated.”

His fame became such that a publisher picked up on his life story – now to be published as Je Fais Rire Le Monde, Mais Le Monde Me Fait Pleurer – I Make The World Laugh, But The World Makes Me Cry.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt in Space.com, via CNN:

After a few close calls, astronomers have finally obtained the first photograph of a planet beyond our solar system, SPACE.com has learned. The planet is thought to be one to two times as massive as Jupiter. It orbits a star similar to a young version of our sun. The star, GQ Lupi, has been observed by a team of European astronomers since 1999. They have made three images using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. The Hubble Space Telescope and the Japanese Subaru Telescope each contributed an image, too. The work was led by Ralph Neuhaeuser of the Astrophysical Institute & University Observatory (AIU). “The detection of the faint object near the bright star is certain,” Neuhaeuser told SPACE.com on Friday.

More here.

Emma Brockes interviews Jane Fonda for The Guardian:

Her memoir, My Life So Far, has been seized on in pre-publicity for its chapter about her marriage to Roger Vadim, the French film director, who, she reveals, coerced her into having threesomes with prostitutes when they lived in Paris in the 1960s. It was not her intention to be salacious. The book is honest and humorous, but the memories are couched in a language you don’t hear much these days. The reason she went along with Vadim’s demands, she says, is that “when I met him, I was on a search for womanhood. I was terrified of being a woman because it meant being a victim and being destroyed like my mother was.”

Fonda’s discursive style was forged in the late 60s and early 70s, during those huge waves of activism when “paradigms of hierarchical patriarchy” were all the rage. Although she wryly observes in the book that she might have toned it down a bit – that she made herself unlikeable by banging her drum so loudly – there is nevertheless something affecting about her refusal to soften, to flirt with neo-feminism’s more digestible language. When I suggest that the word patriarchy is an anachronism – that, while no one would deny inequality exists, lots of women would bridle at the suggestion they are victims of a patriarchal system – she fires back: “Part of what my book delineates is how misogyny is internalised: the need to be perfect, to please, to be malleable. And that this is true for otherwise strong, successful women like me. No, Emma, patriarchy is very much alive and well, and we have to do something about that.”

Read more here.

“In modern America, an amazing number of people have thrown themselves into the work of researching and writing the history of the American Left—many more than are justified by the relative importance of the topic. These scholars have taken up the subject in order to understand something about their own lives—to explain how and why they came to feel so alienated from the mainstream of American politics, and what their alienation was like, and what uses might be drawn from their experiences. Books on these themes—on the history of the Communist Party USA, on the old Socialists, on the New Left, and so on—make up a main current of the modern historical literature. Yet none of these books has ever managed to eclipse Marxian Socialism in the United States—the classic of classics in this particular field. In any case, as I glance back at Bell’s book today, I see in it one of the inspirations for my own adult life and work.

My transition from once-born to twice-born turned me into someone who was curious and eager to write about the history of the Left—sometimes in order to promote a political agenda, but mostly for another reason: I wanted to discover truths, if I possibly could—about America and other parts of the world; about political movements; about social theory; about human nature. This is a gloomier project than merely advancing a political agenda. Agendas tend to be hopeful; truths, not so hopeful. A triumphal spirit runs through a great deal of American history, but not through the particular subset of American history that contains the political Left.

A shadow fell across my dinner with Dan when we reminisced about the strike of 1968—the shadow of what had happened to him at Columbia; what had happened to the left-wing movement that emerged from the strike; and what had happened to our common friend, his fondly remembered student and my SDS “brother,” who had concentrated in his own person all the disasters of the era. But it is in the nature of the second-born to live in the shadows. The blue sky, in Emerson’s phrase, belongs to the first-born, and afterward comes the lifting of the veil and the gazing at Medusa’s face.”

From Bookforum.

“Until the 19th century, mathematicians knew about only two kinds of geometry: the Euclidean plane and the sphere. It was therefore a deep shock to their community to find that there existed in principle a completely other spatial structure whose existence was discerned only by overturning a 2000-year-old prejudice about “parallel” lines. The discovery of hyperbolic space in the 1820s and 1830s by the Hungarian mathematician Janos Bolyai and the Russian mathematician Nicholay Lobatchevsky marked a turning point in mathematics and initiated the formal field of non-Euclidean geometry. For more than a century, mathematicians searched in vain for a physical surface with hyperbolic geometry. Starting in the 1950s, they began to suggest possibilities for constructing such surfaces. Eventually, in 1997, Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University, made the first useable physical model of the hyperbolic — a feat many mathematicians had believed was impossible — using, of all things, crochet. Taimina and her husband, David Henderson, a geometer at Cornell, are the co-authors of Experiencing Geometry, a widely used textbook on both Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces. Margaret Wertheim, founder of the Institute for Figuring and a new regular contributor to Cabinet, spoke to them about crocheting and non-Euclidean geometry.”

More here.

Carolyn Y. Johnson in The Boston Globe:

IN HER NEW BOOK, ”Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel,” Rebecca Goldstein, a novelist and currently visiting professor of philosophy at Trinity College, brings all her skills to bear on a difficult man and his difficult math. As she explained in a recent interview at her Cambridge apartment, she set out to correct misinterpretations of Gödel’s work, which transformed the philosophical underpinnings of mathematics, but ended up ”inhabiting his mind.”

When Gödel, born in 1906 in what is now the Czech Republic, was formulating his ideas in Vienna in the 1920s, mathematicians across the world theorized that arithmetic was a human construction. They were sure that math arose from a set of man-made rules (like a modern-day computer program), or was ”like a higher form of chess.”

That went against everything Gödel believed: For him, math was a description of an abstract reality, transcending human rules and inventions. In 1930, the 23-year-old Gödel thought he had proved that such an abstract world did exist. With his first Incompleteness theorem, he demonstrated that in a mathematical system there are things that are true that cannot be proved. He followed with a second Incompleteness theorem, which said it was impossible to prove the consistency of a mathematical system when you are working within that system.

The proofs transformed logic and branches of math, but Gödel was tragically misunderstood. Far from what he intended, many took ”incompleteness” to mean that philosophical uncertainty had spread from the humanities and arts to the most logical human enterprise – math.

Gödel immigrated to the United States in 1940 and took up residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, where he found a conversation partner and confidant in Albert Einstein, but felt increasingly alienated by a world that did not understand his breakthrough. After Einstein’s death, Gödel descended into ever deeper paranoia and madness.

Read more here.

Kenneth L. Woodward in Newsweek:

  John Paul II held the chair of Saint Peter for more than 26 years—leading his flock longer than almost any other pope. For nearly a decade, he persevered in office despite a slow and painfully public deterioration from Parkinson’s disease. This avid outdoor athlete who spent many a papal vacation skiing and hiking in the mountains, this former actor who made all the world his stage, this relentless global traveler who bent and kissed the tarmac in tiny countries never before visited by a pope, aged, suffered and physically declined before our eyes. And so we watched as he lost the ability to walk, as he slurred when he tried to talk, as his head dropped and saliva fell from his lips during church ceremonies. Those who follow Christ must welcome suffering, he firmly believed, and he would not hide his own from public view.

Future historians seem certain to record that John Paul personalized the papacy in ways that none of the cardinals who elected him (with 103 of 109 votes after 10 ballots) could have foreseen. He transformed the See of Peter into a fulcrum of world politics—his politics. The papal voice—his voice—was heard and often heeded in major capitals like Moscow and Washington. Above all, he took the papacy—which only a century earlier was locked inside the ecclesiastical confines of Vatican City—on the road. He visited Africa four times, Latin America five, managing altogether an astounding 104 pilgrimages to 129 countries around the globe. In doing so, he transformed the figure of the pope from distant icon to familiar face. His face.

Read more here.

Adam Cohen in the New York Times:

When a young person visits, you should throw him off balance by saying, “You want a wash, I expect,” in a way that suggests he has not quite mastered personal hygiene. An older man should be told how fine it is that his wife is still “moving very briskly about.” And visitors of all ages should be encouraged to talk about their friends, after which you should say that you “wished B. was here” because you never tell “stories behind people’s backs.”

These pointers come from “Lifemanship,” one of a series of acerbic life guides written by Stephen Potter in the 1940’s and 1950’s. “Lifemanship,” which has just been reissued by Moyer Bell, wryly mocked Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and other self-help manuals of its day. Potter’s books do not focus on friendship or success, but on less exalted goals: “winning without actually cheating” (“Gamesmanship”); “creative intimidation” (“One-Upmanship”); and making “the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly” (“Lifemanship”).

The absurdist “Monty Python’s Spamalot” may be the toast of Broadway, but it is Potter’s caustic brand of British humor that is especially in step with our times. His targets – wine snobs, literary poseurs and weekend athletes – are more numerous today than a half-century ago. His major themes – the drive for self-improvement, competitiveness, faking it and sheer malice – are a virtual checklist of modern culture.

More here.

David Whitehouse at the BBC News:

The Vikings could have been using a telescope hundreds of years before Dutch spectacle makers supposedly invented the device in the late 16th century.

This remarkable possibility has emerged from a study of sophisticated lenses just recognised from a Viking site on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. They were initially thought to be merely ornaments.

“It seems that the elliptical lens design was invented much earlier that we thought and then the knowledge was lost,” says Dr Olaf Schmidt, of Aalen University in Germany.

More here.

David Mehegan writes about Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time by Michael Downing, in The Boston Globe:

Downing, a 46-year-old novelist and writing teacher at Tufts University, had never given daylight saving much thought, until one recent October. ”I was turning back my clock,” he said, ”and for the first time in my life, I thought, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing.’ I asked friends: ‘Why do we do it?’ And the more I asked, the more preposterous it seemed — believing that I was actually getting rid of an hour, or adding an hour, to a day.”

He looked into it and, to his delight and amazement, discovered that while ”most people have an immediate answer or two about who did it and why, almost to a person we are wrong.”

More here.

Tanya Gold in The Guardian:

Elizabeth Gaskell is a literary criminal, who, in 1857, perpetrated a heinous act of grave-robbing. Gaskell took Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, the dirtiest, darkest, most depraved fantasy of all time, and, like an angel murdering a succubus, trod on her. In a “biography” called The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published just two years after the author’s death, Gaskell stripped Charlotte of her genius and transformed her into a sexless, death-stalked saint.

As the 150th anniversary of her death on March 31 1855 approaches, it is time to rescue Charlotte Brontë. She has been chained, weeping, to a radiator in the Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire, for too long. Enough of Gaskell’s fake miserabilia. Enough of the Brontë industry’s veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte – filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.

More here.

From the UC Berkeley News:

“Hello. My name is David Byrne, and I’m going to do an introduction to PowerPoint.”

The roar of applause and cheers that greeted this deadpan statement was undoubtedly the most enthusiasm ever exhibited before a lecture held in UC Berkeley’s Dwinelle Hall. Byrne, best known as the front man for the Talking Heads, proceeded to do exactly what he said he would. But while he poked fun at the popular Microsoft presentation software’s bullet-point tyranny and Autocontent Wizard inanity, Byrne also defended its appeal as more than just a business tool — as a medium for art and theater. His talk was titled “I ♥ PowerPoint,” and he confessed that he loves the program not in spite of, but in some ways because of, its shortcomings.

“I love not having an unlimited palette. In that sense it’s like a pencil. You don’t expect to have other typefaces or fonts; you have fun with what’s there,” Byrne said. “Freedom — who needs it?”

“PowerPoint is the Rodney Dangerfield of software: it gets no respect,” summarized Ken Goldberg, the Berkeley engineering professor and artist who invited Byrne to speak as part of the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium series he started in 1997. “It’s easy to ridicule it for its corporate nature, but the real story is about how participatory and democratic it is. High school kids use it, rabbis use it, people even use it for wedding toasts.”

Byrne discovered the software a few years ago and, excited by how easy it was to integrate visuals and music, began to create art pieces with it. He collected them into a book, “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information,” which came with a DVD of about 20 minutes of his “PowerPointillism,” as Goldberg calls it. Those slides — among them images of Dolly the cloned sheep, simple drawings, and arrows jostling each other like a confused school of fish (below right) — cycled across the screen before the lecture began.

More here.  Byrne also writes an award-winning journal on the web (don’t call it a blog!) which you can look at on his website here.

Alice Calaprice in The Guardian:

Although Albert Einstein was a prolific writer, he did not think of himself as one. “In the past, it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell,” he wrote in a fit of frustration to his biographer, Carl Seelig, in 1953. By this time, two years before his death, his archive contained more than 20,000 items, thousands of which were written by him personally. Today, the archive has more than doubled in size.

A physicist, philosopher, humanitarian, pacifist, political agitator and cultural Zionist, Einstein was also a formidable writer, and very quotable. Because he wrote almost exclusively in German, his words have been translated into dozens of languages – though, as everyone knows, much can be lost in translation.

Translators have difficulty reproducing his sentences faithfully because they inevitably need to move the words around, causing them to lose their rhythm. Moreover, some of Einstein’s words have been so miserably mistranslated that one can’t recognise the original. Different versions can also lead to confusion about what he actually said. Einstein, as is the case with most writers, is best read in his mother tongue.

More here.

From the Technology Review at MIT:

“Global village” was always an idealistic oxymoron. Politically, culturally, and economically, the differences among nations loom far larger than any differences that might exist among neighborhoods made up of small clutches of homes and shops.

In the following collection of stories, Technology Review brings you the view from seven countries. They are a sampling of the world: Northern Hemisphere and Southern, nations developed and developing, with traditions democratic, autocratic, and Communist. In four cases (China, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States), the writers are editors of Technology Review or of one of its foreign-language editions. For reports on technology in the other three countries (South Africa, Chile, and Brazil), we turned to journalists who cover those countries. We asked these writers to report on which emerging technologies are the most important for their nations’ societies and economies, and to explain what makes these technolo­gies uniquely characteristic of their countries.

Each country reveals its own preoccupations, usually born out of its peculiar history and current circumstances. Leave it to the Dutch, for example, to pour computer modeling resources into the management of water and soil—endeavors without which the Netherlands’ very existence would be imperiled. The United States has measured the value of R&D projects largely by their potential for adding to the nervous nation’s power to fight wars and defend against terrorist attack. In Germany, home of the world’s first superhighways and some of its most storied carmakers, it’s no surprise to see projects aimed at making driving safer and smarter.

In all, our reporters identified more than two dozen emerging technologies or ideas about innovation as vital to the futures of these seven countries. But even those innovations that most directly address urgent regional needs prove to have application for the entire planet.

More here.

Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times:

Last spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali took her ”Dutch mother” — the woman who taught her the language and cared for her after she arrived in the Netherlands as a refugee in 1992 — to lunch at the Dudok brasserie, near the Parliament in The Hague. As always, Hirsi Ali’s armed security detail was there. They have been her companions since she started receiving death threats in September 2002. Hirsi Ali, who was born in Somalia and has been a member of the Dutch Parliament since January 2003, had endorsed the view that Islam is a backward religion, condemned the way women live under it and said that by today’s standards, the prophet Muhammad would be considered a perverse tyrant. She had also announced that she was no longer a believing Muslim. The punishment for such apostasy is, according to strict interpretations of Islam, death. That day at the Dudok, several dozen vocational students were taking up the main restaurant, so she and her guards parked at two tables near the bar. Hirsi Ali had her back to the restaurant when one of the students, apparently a Dutch convert to Islam, tapped her on the shoulder. ”I turned around,” she recalls in her elegant English, ”and saw this sweet, young Dutch guy, about 24 years old. With freckles! And he was like, ‘Madam, I hope the mujahedeen get you and kill you.’ ” Hirsi Ali handed him her knife and told him, ”Why don’t you do it yourself?”

The story is, like much in Hirsi Ali’s life, an inseparable mix of the terrifying and the tender.

Read on here.