Jennifer Viegas in New Scientist:

Smelling a male pheromone prompts the same brain activity in homosexual men as it does in heterosexual women, a new study has found. It did not excite the sex-related region in the brains of heterosexual males, although an oestrogen-derived compound found in female urine did.

The testosterone-derived chemical AND is found in male sweat and is believed to be a pheromone. It activated the anterior hypothalamus and medial preoptic area of gay men and straight women alike. Researchers led by Ivanka Savic at the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden believe this brain region integrates the hormonal and sensory cues used in guiding sexual behaviour.

The research demonstrates a likely link between brain function and sexual orientation, Savic suggests. But she told New Scientist that the study “does not answer the cause-and-effect question”.

So the brain-activation of gay men by AND may contribute to sexual orientation of those men, or simply be the result of their orientation and sexual behaviour. She added that the brain scans revealed no anatomical differences between any of the participant’s brains.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt in Space.com:

Astronomers photographed a cosmic event this morning which they believe is the birth of a black hole, SPACE.com has learned.

A faint visible-light flash moments after a high-energy gamma-ray burst likely heralds the merger of two dense neutron stars to create a relatively low-mass black hole, said Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. It is the first time an optical counterpart to a very short-duration gamma-ray burst has ever been detected.

Gamma rays are the most energetic form of radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, which also includes X-rays, light and radio waves.

The merger occurred 2.2 billion light-years away, so it actually took place 2.2 billion years ago and the light just reached Earth this morning.

More here.

‘Over at the Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City, three fiction writers have agreed to isolate themselves in small writing cells for a project called “Novel: A Living Installation.” Each has promised to finish a novel by June 4. That is 25 days away. Odds are that these will either be teeny-tiny novels or very bad ones.’

Read the whole savaging here (Free Reg Required). This opinion piece makes a counterpoint with the positive coverage of the show from the Monday Arts section (read it on 3Quarksdaily here).

Since I’m involved with the project as a Guest Lecturer at the Panel on the state of the novel on May 22, I don’t pretend to have an objective response to the Op-Ed. I too wonder what the literary results will be; greatness is not guaranteed under any conditions, and I personally would agree that the constraints make it even more difficult for the writers. (Especially the constraint of reading bad reviews before they’ve even started.)

But here are a few notes on the assumptions embedded in the opinion piece:

1. That the novels produced during the month will be completed final products. But I doubt that any of the people involved with the project think that. In truth, this is an experiment in Process, an application to literature of ideas developed for modern art. It’s also at heart a fun residency experiment to see what the writers will come up with, and I doubt very much that the writers will try to sell the work “as is” afterwards. Ed Park has it right when he says, in the Village Voice, that “Novel” should be followed by a 5 year project called “Revision.” The Op-Ed assumes the writers don’t know this, which is silly.

2. The Times assumes that “the more seriously the writers take the proper business of making their own work, the more the installation trivializes the nature of writing.” This assumes that such a thing as “the proper business” of writing exists, and that this business cannot take place under any but certain conditions. Speaking from my own experience, I find myself able to write under scrutiny only with extreme difficulty, and don’t think I would have produced anything good. But there are other, more extroverted writers – Kerouac springs to mind – who wrote under equally mad conditions.

3. The Op-Ed refers to “the world in which literature is really made” (as opposed to the world of this project). What world is that, exactly? The world of a Barnes & Noble Starbucks cafe? The world of a motel or a friend’s bedroom? Yaddo? The writer seems to think that all writers operate the same way, disappearing into a comfy study somewhere in a smoking jacket and finding his/her fountain pen suddenly moving to the flourishes of inspiring birdsong…Which of these venues for writing “trivialize” the writing process? It’s a meaningless question because different writers have different methods of composition.

4. There is a strong modernist tradition of writing being produced under various constraints. There are novels written without the letter “E,” surrealist games and experiments such as the Exquisite Corpse, writing done according to rules, collaborative novels, Blogger novels, etc. This is probably the best spirit in which to view the Flux “Novel” project, not in old fashioned terms of isolated talents producing masterpieces far from the public gaze. My own personal view is that writing is a lonely business, but I don’t assume that everybody works the same way.

5. What’s the harm in it, exactly? That is my last and most serious question for the Op-Ed writer. How does trying to make art under strange conditions hurt literature? Is the writer worried that everybody’s going to rush out and produce novels this way? – I Fear It Not. Perhaps the work produced in the residency experiment will be a start on something interesting, or a first draft to be reworked later on, or an intriguing failure, or maybe it will be brilliant, who knows? We can also turn the tables here: Is “literature” also wounded every time an average or even bad novel is published? If so, then there are other writers who have committed greater sins out of baser motives, and with the aid of large and respected publishing houses, too.

6. The present state of American letters is not damaged one iota by this project, and, in truth, any project that brings attention to any kind of novel writing at all ought to be applauded rather than scorned. For goodness sake, relax. I realize that “Novel” may not live up to the standards of great fiction writers like Judith Miller or Jayson Blair, but it’s a fun and mostly harmless experiment that most people seem to enjoy.

Update: Gawker has weighed in, on the side of Flux Factory.

Margaret Wertheim in the New York Times:

At the dawn of the scientific revolution, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler was struck by a vision. Pondering the distances between the planets, he realized that the sizes of their orbits could be explained by a nested set of Platonic solids.

Known to the Greeks as the “cosmic figures,” these five forms – the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron – have the property of being perfectly regular.

Kepler’s vision turned out to be a mirage, as his own research on planetary orbits eventually proved. But the mystique of these solids has endured and in a small, quixotic way, Kepler’s fantasy has finally been realized. Dr. Wayne Daniel, a retired physicist and puzzle expert, has designed an interlocking wooden puzzle that is a complete set of Platonic solids. Like a Russian matryoshka doll, each layer peels away to reveal a smaller form within, only in this case each layer has a different geometry.

More here.

From Nature:

When the US magazine Time announced its selection of the “twenty greatest thinkers and scientists of the twentieth century”, readers would hardly have been surprised to find that Albert Einstein was included. But how many readers, seeing the name Kurt Gödel on the list, would have had any idea who he was, or what he had done to deserve this accolade? Both these well-written books tell the story of the life of this strange and tormented man, and explain some of his accomplishments.

Born in 1906 to a German-speaking family in Brno (which is today in the Czech Republic), Gödel was educated at university in Vienna, at first studying physics but soon finding that mathematics was his true métier. He was particularly attracted by the rigour of mathematical methods and the certainty of mathematical truth, so the controversies over the validity of these methods that raged during the 1920s fascinated him.

More here.

Julie Salamon in the New York Times:

On Saturday night, in front of 200 onlookers, Ms. Stone and two other novelists, ensconced in neighboring pods, embarked on a variation of the spectator sports made familiar by reality television. Ms. Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie are the participants in “Novel: A Living Installation” at the Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City. The goal is for each to complete a novel by June 4. The purpose is to consider the private and public aspects of writing.

No cameras will record this voyeuristic experiment, though visitors can peep occasionally (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m). The potential for public humiliation comes not from the perils of constant surveillance, but from the more familiar writers’ problem of failing to meet a deadline. Make that deadlines. They will give weekly readings of their works in progress on Saturdays at 8 p.m., and take part in two public discussions scheduled for this coming Sunday and May 22.

What the novelists write is not as important as how they live while they are writing. Each habitat was designed by builders who, like the writers, entered a competition. The writers can emerge for only 90 minutes a day and must record on time cards the reason for their absence (laundry, bathroom, snacks). Each evening they will gather together to eat a meal cooked by a chef from a local restaurant…

The idea for “Novel” came to Morgan Meis, 32, a founder and the president of Flux Factory, as he was trying to finish his dissertation on the Marxist philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, and his theories of experience. “I said I should do a project called ‘Dissertation’ where I lock myself in a box” and just finish the thing, Mr. Meis said.

Instead, he staged this show, together with Kerry Downey, 25, a fellow Fluxer. They put out notices on various Web sites, at graduate schools and architecture firms. Two hundred writers and a dozen designers applied.

Read the rest of the article, and also see a nice slide show, here. And there is more by Jeremy Olshan in the New York Post (registration required):

Cervantes penned most of “Don Quixote” in the pen. Dostoevsky found inspiration in incarceration.

In the tradition of those literary inmates, three novelists locked themselves in a Queens art gallery Saturday, with a self-imposed sentence of 30 days and 75,000 words — give or take a few paragraphs off for good behavior.

Grant Bailie, Laurie Stone and Ranbir Sidhu must complete an entire novel each, while being confined to individual “habitats” — a k a artsy cells — in the Flux Factory in Long Island City

Continue reading here.  There’s also a piece in The Village Voice here.

[Disclosure: Morgan Meis is a 3 Quarks Daily editor, and I am on the advisory board of the Flux Factory.]

From The Old Town Review:

OTR is pleased to be collaborating with Flux Factory, Inc., on Novel: A Living Installation, by hosting the web logs of three writers, Grant Bailie, Ranbir Sidhu, and Laurie Stone, who are writing novels at a most unusual residency project. Look for the first entries to appear around May 14th, if not earlier. – Eds.

At 9pm on May 7th, 2005, three novelists will be enclosed within three individual habitats designed and constructed by three teams of architect/artists. For thirty days, this will be their reality. Nightly, they will dine together (courtesy of a revolving cast of chefs). Public readings of the novels-in-progress will be held every Saturday evening, with viewing hours throughout the week. In June, each writer will emerge from his or her habitat having completed a novel.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Chuck Palahniuk is one of the most popular novelists in the world. Put simply, his fiction hits a nerve with people whose lives – and desires and neuroses and pitch-black humour – go unrecorded by most writers of fiction. Over lunch at the Multnomah Falls, a spectacular Oregon landmark, Chuck tells me about his new book, Haunted, a selection of interconnecting short stories – including ‘Guts’ – and odd, neurotic-sounding poems. In its formal experimentation, Haunted breaks new ground, and, one suspects, may test the patience of the Chuck fans who don’t like reading any books but his. It concerns a group of would-be writers who come together to tell their stories, and, more pertinently, to avoid telling the bigger, darker collective story of the group. The bigger story emerges nonetheless and it is by turns nauseating, darkly funny and brutally graphic.

‘The initial premise for the book was Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories,’ says Chuck, acknowledging an influence that few have picked up on. ‘Poe was so good at writing stories that exploited the unspoken horrors of his day. He was obsessed with premature burial, for instance. I kept thinking, “If Poe were alive today, what would be the everyday horrors he would write about?”‘ He pauses to fork some seared salmon into his mouth. ‘Plus, I had to write a food book. Every author has to eventually write a food book.’

More here.

My latest interest is the web site Global Guerrillas, run by terrorism analyst and former counter-terror unit member John Robb. Robb posts irregularly, but when he does you feel like actually interesting thought is emerging from the confrontation with international terrorism. Robb is about to unveil, on May 17th, a new paper or short e-book developing a doctrine of global guerilla warfare.

My favorites from his previous posts:

Small groups, global warfare, and the democratization of violence
Small groups can now replicate the state’s most vital commodity – large-scale violence.

Mapping terrorist networks
Using statistical analysis, not moralizing backwash, to understand Al Qaeda.

The bazaar of violence in Iraq
Fighting groups with no central structure.

Was 9/11 a “Black Swan”?
Expecting the unexpected.

If you don’t know anything about Michael Heizer and his monumental (literally) sculpture project “City” you owe it to yourself to check out Michael Kimmelman’s article about it along with the accompanying slide show with commentary.

It is truly an amazing creation and Heizer lives up to its grandiosity by being a complete maniac as a person. In a way, it’s perfect. “City” reminds one of nothing so much as the massive constructions of ancient empires. It is a modernist ziggurat. And Heizer is just the kind of imperious monomaniac you need to create such madness. Ramses II eat your heart out.

From Paul La Farge at The Believer.

. . . in some circles Tintin is accused of more or less overt colonialism: he is the European who teaches the savages their business.[2] Not so the Tintin who appears in Tuten’s novel. Dispatched to Machu Picchu, the site of Neruda’s great poem of South American identity,[3] Tintin meets the Lieutenant dos Amantes, who recites for him a prophecy concerning the coming of the jaguar god: “Long before the Spanish arrived, the Indians believed that one day a man with golden hair, a man half-animal, would appear from the West, sent by Viracocha, the Creator.” The Incas took this god to be the ruthless Spanish explorer Pizarro—who came from the East, but they couldn’t have known it. But really, who could it be, if not Tintin himself? Especially because the prophecy goes on to state, “Some say this new god is a man; some, a woman; some androgynous. Some believe that he will be very young, or very old, or both at once.” Tintin is blonde, unsexed, youthful of aspect though he’s over seventy years old. He must be the one who will unite the Indians “and all their kind from Tierra del Fuego to the northernmost limits of their culture. And this divinity will restore to them their rightful lands and their ancient arts, and afterward he will vanish like rain in the desert.” Anticolonialists, take heart; in this new world, Tintin is a revolutionary.

‘Wendy Lesser, the founding Editor of the Californian little magazine, the Threepenny Review, has had the good idea of inviting a variety of writers who have one thing in common: that they have left their native language behind (none, so far as I know, has been actually banished) in order to write in English (most of them have settled in the United States), to meditate on what this transition has meant to them. The authors range from the well-known to the relatively obscure, from novelists to doctors to professors of history; and the languages range from Bangla to Gikuyu, from Chinese to Scots, with most of the European languages, including Yiddish, represented. A few of the contributors are so filled with self-importance that little of interest emerges from their pieces, but by and large the essays are informative, and well-written, and several are moving.’

From Gabriel Josipovici’s review of The Genius of Language in the TLS.

3M engineer Art Fry’s invention, the PostIt note, celebrates 25 years of proud existance, changing office life and and sparking the “design by PostIt” unofficial movement. The story of PostIt’s invention is repeated as example for thinking out of the box and business innovation, and Greg Beato writes about it for The Rake

“Post-it Notes, on the other hand, were dynamic, customizable, business casual. They inspired spontaneity, rapid ideation, free association. You could link one seemingly unrelated idea to another without worrying about any logical cohesion of ideas; that’s what the glue was for. After all, the digital drudgery of Office Space and “Dilbert” didn’t tell the full story of office life in the eighties and nineties. It was also the era of Wired and Fast Company, the rebel businessman, thinking outside the box. One day, you might get flynned. On another, you could map out a billion-dollar business plan on half a dozen tiny yellow squares.”

Funny post by J.M. Tyree at the Old Town Review Chronicles:

I’m looking for an artist to help me draw up a flowchart of connections between various extremities of the right-wing. Interested parties, email me. Here are a few initial notes, starting from the rather arbitrary point of recent interest, Paul Sperry:

Paul Sperry wrote Infiltration, a book claiming that Muslim extremists have penetrated Washington, including the FBI and possibly the White House. Sperry was interviewed by Jamie Glazov for FrontPage magazine. FrontPage is run by David Horowitz, the “radical son” turned rabid neocon. Horowitz is behind Discover the Network, which purports to draw connections between “the left” and terrorism, running the gamut from Zarqawi to Streisand. Discover the Network hosts a weblog called Moonbat Central which publishes the work of Steven Plaut, a virulent ultra-Zionist hate-speech specialist. Plaut’s work at Moonbat is published under the extremely ill-disguised name “Plaut’s Complaint.” According to David Neuman in Tikkun (July, 2004, “The Threat to Academic Freedom in Israel-Palestine”), Plaut has disseminated vicious slurs against opponents in extremist Kahanist sites. Kahanism is so extreme that the State of Israel has outlawed groups espousing Kahane’s ideology” (Wikipedia).

Back to Sperry and the Infiltration thesis. Daniel Pipes has praised the book highly. Pipes created, along with Martin Kramer, the organization Campus Watch. Campus Watch has become notorious as a file-keeper on liberal and left-leaning tendencies in Middle Eastern Studies, urging students to spy on their teachers by using this “Keep Us Informed” Form. The Middle East Forum, which created Campus Watch, is the organ of Pipes, who maintains that the Japanese internment camps might have lessons for dealing with Islam…

Much more here.

Gary Shteyngart reviews Monumental Propaganda by Vladimir Voinovich, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield, in the New Tork Review of Books:

If Russia weren’t governed by fools and reprobates, if the roads were smooth and wide and free of bandits, if Russia were suddenly a modern European country as far removed from Stalin’s legacy as today’s Germany is from Hitler’s, three groups of citizens would suffer the most: corrupt traffic cops, oligarchs, and satirists. Of this last group, Vladimir Voinovich is possibly the most important Russian satirical writer of the last fifty years, and given the absurdity and repressiveness that characterized those fifty years, one of the most subversive writers in the nation’s history. If all Russian writers (as Dostoevsky said) are supposed to come “from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,'” Voinovich has come directly out of Gogol’s “Nose.”

More here.

Lee Siegel in Slate:

Click here to read a slide-show essay about Max Ernst, the German surrealist.

Kate Zernike reviews Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Michelle Feynman, in the New York Times Book Review:

In 1975, a woman from Seattle wrote the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman to declare that she had fallen in love after seeing him on ”Nova.” ”Are there lots of physicists with fans?” she wrote. ”You have one!”

Feynman wrote back flattered — ”I need no longer be jealous of movie stars” — and signed off, ”Your fan-nee (or whatever you call it — the whole business is new to me).”

It wasn’t, of course.

There were the high school students from Springfield, Mo., who sent him a hand-lettered birthday card to thank him for writing their textbook. The German man who wrote to share the poem he had created from a Feynman lecture. A man from Massachusetts wrote of a move afoot to draft Feynman for governor. A dentist wrote to ask his views on nuclear energy; an office equipment salesman, to propose an idea for a particle accelerator. A California correspondent inquired whether Feynman believed it possible to record dreams on tape, the way you do television programs.

More here.

From Science Daily:

Researchers from the University of Southern California and the Doheny Eye Institute’s Doheny Retina Institute will be presenting data on the first six patients implanted with an intraocular retinal prosthesis-more popularly referred to as an artificial retina-developed and manufactured in partnership with Second Sight Medical Products, Inc., of Sylmar, Calif.

According to Mark Humayun, professor of ophthalmology at the Keck School of Medicine and the lead investigator on the project, all six of the previously blind patients have been able to detect light, identify objects in their environment, and even perceive motion after implantation with the epiretinal device.

More here.

Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:

Reversing a decades-long trend toward “global dimming,” Earth’s surface has become brighter since 1990, scientists are reporting today.

The brightening means that more sunlight – and thus more heat – is reaching the ground. That could partly explain the record-high global temperatures reported in the late 1990’s, and it could accelerate the planet’s warming trend…

Some scientists have reported that from 1960 to 1990, the amount of sunshine reaching the ground decreased at a rate of 2 percent to 3 percent per decade.

More here.

Adrienne Rich in The Boston Review:

June Jordan’s work embraced a half century in which she dwelt as poet, intellectual, and activist—also as teacher, observer, and recorder. In a sense unusual among 20th-century poets of the United States, she believed in and lived the urgency of the word—along with action—to resist abuses of power and violations of dignity in and beyond her society.

And the wind blows the way
of the ones who make
and break
the rules? . . .

because
because
because as far as I can tell
less than a thousand children playing
in the garden of a thousand flowers
means the broken neck
of birds

I commit my body and my language . . .

More here.