From The Guardian:

Maggy Hendry has co-edited the third and fourth editions of the Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women’s Biography alongside the original compiler and editor, Jenny Uglow. In honour of International Women’s Day, she has chosen her top 10 women from the latest edition of the Dictionary, which was published at the beginning of the year. “

1. Madonna
For liberating the brassiere. She is largely responsible for modern blatant bra-wearing. Back in the day, perhaps because we were supposed to have burnt them, we would have died of embarrassment if anyone caught a glimpse of so much as a strap. Bras as outerwear and also their straps have been out of the closet ever since Madonna got together with Jean Paul Gaultier et al.
Dictionary entry: Madona Louise Veronica Ciccone (1958-)

2. Frida Kahlo
For dedication to her art in spite of living a life of pain, and for her brutally honest self portraits which show her with a moustache, a beard and ferociously dark eyebrows that cross in the middle. An excellent role model for the hirsute.
Dictionary entry: Frida Kahlo (1910-54)

3. Jezebel
For a reputation which has been evolving for around three millennia. A woman with a penchant for make-up who lived life on her own terms, Jezebel achieves 597,000 results on the world wide web. She had a second world war missile named after her and appeared in celluloid as a ruthless southern belle played by Bette Davis in 1935. She is still to be seen roaming high streets up and down the land on Saturday nights (according to her mother).
Dictionary entry: Jezebel (c9th century BC)

And read more here:

7. Martha Gellhorn
For her fearless reporting of the Spanish Civil War and other conflicts including the second world war and wars in China, Vietnam and central America. Also for her stormy five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway.
Dictionary entry: Martha Gellhorn (1908-98)

8. Mary Anning
For finding and unearthing a complete ichthyosaurus at the age of 12, and for discovering the first pterodactyl.
Dictionary entry: Mary Anning (1799-1847)

9. Mary Kingsley
For coming out of the west African swamps with a necklace of leeches, for writing about it with humour and for her insistence on wearing Victorian clothing – layers of petticoats, heavy skirts, boots and highnecked blouses – in all situations.
Dictionary entry: Mary Kingsley (1862-1900)

10. Rosa Parks
‘Mother of the civil rights movement’. For sitting at the front of the bus. Her action sparked off demonstrations, the eventual abolition of the segregation laws and the emergence of Martin Luther King as a national leader.
Dictionary entry: Rosa Lee Parks (1913-)

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Chandler Burr in The New Yorker:

On a sunny afternoon last June, the French perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena arrived at the offices of Hermès, the luxury-goods maker, in Pantin, just north of Paris, to present his first essais—or olfactory sketches—for the company’s next perfume. Ellena, who is fifty-seven years old, had recently been named Hermès’s first in-house perfumer by Jean-Louis Dumas Hermès, the chairman of the company. Dumas Hermès wanted to fix a delicate problem: Hermès had an elegant perfume collection that included classic scents like Calèche and 24, Faubourg, yet they sold only modestly. Chanel, one of Hermès’s chief rivals, made ten times as much money on perfume. (Led by its eighty-three-year-old warhorse, Chanel No. 5, the company’s 2003 sales totalled $1.2 billion.) It might be possible for Hermès to make one of its older scents chic through advertising, but the family had chosen a more daring strategy: it would adopt Chanel’s approach, and set up its own perfume laboratory.

More here.

Jane Stevenson reviews Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler, in The Guardian:

This learned and entertaining book starts around 3,300BC and works forwards. Given that it’s a short history of the last 5,000 years, it is remarkably comprehensive as well as thought-provoking. For most people, learning a first language is so ‘easy’ you don’t remember doing it and picking up others later on is a tedious chore.

It therefore seems reasonable that any time one group of people conquers another, the victors should impose their language, but historically, things haven’t always worked like that. Nicholas Ostler’s aim is to look at why some languages survive and spread, while others, for example the Aboriginal languages of Australia, fail.

He identifies three major paths to success: breed your way to majority status (like Chinese), spread by conquest (like Arabic) or give rise to a popular religion (like Sanskrit). But there is also another aspect contributing to the long-term survival of a language, which is to become classical.

More here.

James Bennet in the New York Times Magazine:

…national coherence and democratic aspiration combine to explain why, on Arafat’s death, the Palestinian public pivoted from Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas and why it did it so smoothly. More than four years into their latest violent conflict with Israel, Palestinians drew together behind Arafat’s longtime No. 2, Abbas, who turns 70 this month, as one of the few national figures remaining — one with the credentials to span the divided populations of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the diaspora. In an election Jan. 9, he won more than 60 percent of the vote. That he did so well was evidence to Palestinians of their national unity; that he did not do better was evidence to them of the strength of their democratic institutions. Hassan Khreisheh, an opposition member of the Palestinian Parliament, tied these themes together when he proudly declared at the swearing-in of Abbas, ”Our people have put an end to the 99.999 percent that Arab leaders have become accustomed to.” Palestinians were now exceptional, he was saying, because they had democracy.

More here.

Of the most frequent two contributors to this blog, one is Indian (Robin), one is Pakistani (me), so we like news like this from the New York Times:

As India and Pakistan faced off here in Mohali, in the heart of a divided Punjab Province, for the first test match of a six-week long cricket series, Indians and Pakistanis greeted each other with a mixture of intense curiosity, apprehension, guilt, affection, longing, hope.

Spectators wandered around the stadium here with an Indian flag painted on one cheek and a Pakistani flag on the other. On the streets nearby, sari shops announced discounts for “our friends from Pakistan.” Local families took perfect strangers into their homes and refused to take any money. Inside Indian living rooms, Pakistanis traded stories about weddings and children, the quality of the roads, the price of chickens and motorbikes.

Amid the enthusiasm, ordinary Indians and Pakistanis uttered the unthinkable. “There is no difference between us,” said Naveed Ahmed, of Bahalwalnagar, in the Pakistani Punjab. It was his first time in India.

Adding an explicitly political flavor to the game, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is expected to attend a match during the series, most likely on April 2 in the Indian city of Kochi…

The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was himself born in what is now Pakistan. The Pakistani president, General Musharraf, was born in New Delhi.

More here. Oh, and the match itself has now ended in a draw. Details here.

Cosma Shalizi reviews Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution by Ray Jackendoff:

Still, since we’re all good materialists and mechanists these days, we have to suppose that language is implemented in the brain somehow, and it would be nice to know how. Put a little differently: my version of English has a certain structure to it; therefore there must be something in my mind, in my brain and its interaction with its environment, which corresponds to that structure, just as is true of my ability to throw a frisbee, cook qorma-e-behi, or find my way around downtown Ann Arbor. If there are various ways of describing the mathematical structure of my version of English, which there are, it would be nice to know which one most closely corresponded to the mental mechanisms involved. These could, of course, be totally idiosyncratic, but that would be very odd, and it seems more reasonable to assume that the way I implement English is very similar to the way other speakers of my dialect do. It’s a bigger leap, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that the way I implement my native language has got basically the same organization as the way my cousins in Tamil Nadu implement theirs, even though English and Tamil are not related languages.

Thus the enterprise of generative grammar: characterize the structure of human languages in ways which illuminate the mental mechanisms involved in its use. Jackendoff has devoted his professional life to this ambitious undertaking — in his book The Linguistics Wars, Randy Allen Harris describes him as “Chomsky’s conscience”, the guy who did the hard work of filling in the messy details needed to make Uncle Noam’s proposals actually work, nor has his commitment to generative grammar (as opposed to Chomsky) weakened. But Foundations of Language is not intended just as an incremental advance in generative grammar, or even as a summary of what has been achieved, but rather as a fairly significant reformulation and reorientation.

More here.

Dylan Evans in The Guardian:

It all started with Stephen Hawking, whose first popular book, A Brief History of Time, hit the bookshops in 1988. Very soon, others (myself included) jumped on the bandwagon, and popular science soon gained its own section in many bookshops.

With the boom, inevitably, there came a torrent of rubbish. The stylistic innovations of the trendsetters soon became, in the hands of the disciples, stale recipes, recycled over and over in formulaic and uninspiring ways. Even the titles began to seem repetitive: The Panda’s Thumb, Galileo’s Finger, Einstein’s Brain … What a pity nobody had the chutzpah to write a book about Newton’s penis.

A decade and a half later, there are signs that the popular science boom is running out of steam.

More here.

Alan Boyle reports for MSNBC:

You’d think explaining the beginnings of the universe would be enough for astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. But no: In “Origins,” a new book and public-TV miniseries, the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium goes beyond the Big Bang to take on the rise of the solar system, life and intelligence as well. Any one of those subjects is worthy of being covered in a documentary series at least as ambitious as “Origins,” which premieres Tuesday and Wednesday on PBS. And indeed they have been, in productions ranging from “Evolution” to “Life Beyond Earth” to the granddaddy of them all, Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.”

So why is Tyson tying all these cosmic subjects together in a four-hour package? He says that’s the very point he’s trying to bring home. “Only in the last five years have there been the right kinds of advances in the right kinds of fields to be able to do a miniseries on origins,” he told MSNBC.com. “This is ‘Origins’ with a big O, so it’s not just origins of human beings. This is origins of the whole shebang.” Tyson shows how scientists are blending astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and even paleontology to knit together insights about the structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself.

Read more here.

One of the most consistently interesting and eccentric arts collectives in New York City is called The Flux Factory. Headed by the polymathic Morgan Meis, Flux comprises a large gang of diversely talented artists who, in addition to regularly putting up beautifully-curated shows in their own space (a former factory), have graced the city with lovely thought-provoking performances and happenings. Some of my favorites have been: Counter Culture, The Impossible Tea Party, and Classics on Tape. Their recent curated shows have included: Absolute Zero Nowhere, Cute and Scary, What the Book?, and the edible exhibit, All You Can Art.

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

Holland Cotter writes on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Arts Section:

Maybe because Queens has no cultural center – or rather because it has several, but spread miles apart – it has become the home of many of those self-created communities known as artists’ collectives. One, Flux Factory, occupies a floor in a converted factory in Long Island City, an environment that feels a little like a cross between a youth hostel and a space station.

Much of their work is conceptual and performance based, as was the case in a three-month residency they did a few years ago at the Queens Museum of Art. Wearing bright orange coveralls, they clocked in every morning and more or less made up their work as they went. They began with an empty gallery and continually modified the space with gridlike screens and temporary barriers while doing their own projects: making collages, tabulating statistics, building contraptions. The result was a single installation, an accumulation of accumulations, a combination of theater, child’s play and ritual, a Rube Goldbergian version of everyday life.

This May they will present “Novel: A Living Installation Flux Factory,” in which three novelists – Laurie Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Baille – will live on-site, dining together, giving weekly public readings and trying to complete their novels by June 4. The point? To present the act of writing as both the private activity and audience-conscious public performance that it is. To suggest that art is always an activity as much as a product, and that any activity can be art. And to remind us that all of art’s sacred-cow concepts – creativity, inspiration, solitary genius – are fit subjects for laboratory testing.

Read the full article here. Morgan published a delightful piece in Harper’s Magazine about their 3-month project at the Queens Museum of Art entitled “The Devil’s Work,” which you can, and should, read here. Finally, Flux is known for their amazing parties, and there is one tonight: Flux Valley High’s Prom Night. If you live in NYC, come by. Oh, and for more information, here is the Flux Factory website.

Alex Beam writes in his column at the Boston Globe:

A new microgenre of what passes for literature has appeared on the scene: the omnididact’s tale.

Perhaps because everyone feels so stupid, we witness the impulse to get smarter, preferably by reading one book. A tongue-in-cheek version of this quest unfolds in A.J. Jacobs’s recent outing, ”The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.” The New York Times called Jacobs’s journey through the 44-million-word Encyclopedia Britannica ”mesmerizingly uninformative.”

The widely admired Bill Bryson swung at a similar pitch not so long ago, in ”A Short History of Nearly Everything.” The casual observer might be forgiven for confusing Bryson’s self-described ”intellectual odyssey of a lifetime” with science writer Timothy Ferris’s ”The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report,” a book that purported to ”summarize what we know about the cosmos and how we know it.”

More here.

David S. Goodsell reviews Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life, by Richard A. L. Jones, at American Scientist:

Richard A. L. Jones, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield, has provided a new entry to the burgeoning literature on nanotechnology. In Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life, he touches on a variety of subjects in this ever-widening field. These include, to use his classification, top-down methods (such as photolithography of silicon), which are now reaching nanoscale levels; bionanotechnology, “the ‘Mad Max’ or ‘Scrap-heap challenge’ approach to nano-engineering”; biomimetic nanotechnology, which takes its lead from biology but uses the tools of chemistry for construction; and the “radical nanotechnology” of mechanosynthesis in the style of K. Eric Drexler (author of the influential 1986 book Engines of Creation).

Like a knowledgeable host making dinner conversation, Jones moves from topic to topic with a stream of lively banter. We ask “What is it like down there?” and our host tells us about Brownian motion and dispersion forces, using Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage to spice up the conversation.

More here.

The promise of Internet commerce has been easing matching, lowering search costs, and allowing new entrants access to larger markets by de-territorializing them.  While there are Internet banks, this model of consumer borrowing is new and perhaps the beginning of a real revolution in finance.

“This week saw the latest twist on what’s come to be known as the ‘eBay model’ with the launch of Zopa [in the UK] – an online loans service that works in a similar way. Anyone with some spare cash can offer it up for a loan, through Zopa. Lenders set their own interest rates and can choose which borrowers to lend to, based on their credit rating.

Borrowers, meanwhile, can pick a rate that’s right for them and because Zopa is simply assisting the transaction, not lending its own assets, it claims to take a smaller cut (1% of the amount borrowed) than a bank. Safeguards are built in to help prevent lenders being fleeced and the whole outfit is sanctioned by the FSA – Britain’s financial services watchdog.”

Holy hell, this parody of David Horowitz’s Discover the Network is funny. Check out my favorite little fascists, Darkseid and Cylon Centurion. I believe it’s the creation of John Holbo, one of the Crooked’st Timbers, and was brought to my attention via reading the great blog Chez Nadezhda.

From Science Editor Alan Boyle’s weblog:

At one time or another, everyone’s had a tune pop into their head and stay there, even though you wish it would just go away. Those meddlesome melodies are known as sticky songs, or “earworms,” and over the past couple of years, hundreds of Cosmic Log readers have sent in contributions to the earworm list. In Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, researchers report that they have discovered the place in the brain where earworms hide out. It should come as little surprise that the center for earworm activity is the auditory cortex, the same place where sounds are perceived.

Researchers from Dartmouth College and the University of Aberdeen worked with 15 experimental subjects to develop individualized playlists — including songs with lyrics, such as the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” as well as instrumental pieces such as the theme from “The Pink Panther.” (Are those earworms working on you yet?)

Each listener tagged certain tunes as familiar, and others as unfamiliar. Then the tunes were played while the listener was lying in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. At various points in the soundtrack, the music went silent for 3 to 5 seconds, and researchers watched how the brain responded.

During the gaps in the unfamiliar music, activity in the auditory cortex diminished. But when there was a gap in a familiar tune, the auditory cortex kept working away. “It’s like the brain is still hearing the music,” one of the researchers, Dartmouth’s David Kraemer, told me today. “It’s still activating that part of the brain that’s activated when you’re hearing the music. … And it’s interesting to note that we didn’t instruct them to imagine the silent part. It’s something that they just did spontaneously.”

The researchers also saw a difference between the vocals and the instrumentals: Songs with lyrics activated an area known as the auditory association cortex, or Brodmann’s area 22 — which links sounds with other aspects of experience, such as word recognition. The instrumental tunes sparked a more basic level of processing in the primary auditory cortex. Kraemer speculated that when you hear a song with words, you use the words as a shorthand for the full melody — while a wordless melody forces your brain to go farther back to the notes themselves. “You react only as far back as you need to, to reconstruct the relevant part of the experience,” he said. Perhaps this explains why songs with lyrics tend to be “stickier” than instrumental tunes, and why it’s so hard to stop an earworm in its tracks. Your auditory cortex wants to run through the entire experience of “Who Let the Dogs Out,” even though the rest of your brain is longing to stop the music.

Read more here.

Doug Stewart writes in Smithsonian Magazine:

Late in 1919, in a squalid Paris studio strewn with wine bottles, Amedeo Modigliani painted a wistful portrait of his 21-year-old lover Jeanne Hébuterne. A few months later, on January 24, 1920, the impoverished artist died of tubercular meningitis at age 35. The following evening, Hébuterne, eight months’ pregnant with their second child, leapt to her death from a fifth-story window.

During Modigliani’s short and difficult life, the going rate for his elegant, oddly distorted paintings was less than $10, and takers were few. A landlord who confiscated some of his work in lieu of rent used the canvases to patch old mattresses. This past November an anonymous bidder at Sotheby’s auction house in New York City paid $31.3 million for the Hébuterne portrait.

One of the many ironies of Modigliani’s career is that so tortured a life could produce so serene a body of work. His art managed to bridge the stylistic chasm between classical Italian painting and avant-garde Modernism.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt writes in Space.com:

Space weather forecasters have it even tougher than regular weather forecasters. In trying to predict long-range solar activity, they have to rely on a picture of just the half of the Sun they can see. Storms brewing on the backside are hidden from view until they rotate to the front.

Jupiter to the rescue. The giant gas planet reflects solar activity, scientists have learned. And when Jupiter is on the other side of the solar system, it can act as a mirror for flare-ups from the back side of the Sun.

Scientists had previously measured X-rays emanating from the Jovian atmosphere. Those coming from the equator were theorized to be related to solar activity.

More here.

This article wouldn’t normally pass muster for inclusion here at 3QD, lacking as it may be in intellectual depth. I don’t care. If I can help a single Pakistani or Indian New Yorker find chaat somewhere, I will no doubt be alloted at least 36 virgin brides in heaven. For some unfathomable reason, chaat is impossible to make well at home. There are millions of recipes floating around, but it just doesn’t come out right. In Pakistan, it is best bought from the filthy cart of a street vendor, and best swallowed along with a prophylactic dose of Cipro. Trust me, it is worth the Delhi-belly. I have been trying to explain to people what chaat is for some time, and trying to describe its incomparable simultaneous explosion of a million flavors and crispy textures on the palate, always without success. Finally, we have a professional to do the job.

Julia Moskin writes in the New York Times:

Asking Indians in America about chaat, India’s national snacks, is like asking Americans in India about burgers: the word unleashes unbearable cravings, nostalgia and homesickness. “I remember going to Kwality Snacks for papri chaat when I was a boy,” said Gandar Nasri, 74, a retired New York City taxi driver, who moved from Delhi in 1955. “Nothing will ever taste like that again.”

Taste a good chaat, and you understand why it is not soon forgotten.

Chaats are jumbles of flavor and texture: sweet, sour, salty, spicy, crunchy, soft, nutty, fried and flaky tidbits, doused with cool yogurt, fresh cilantro and tangy tamarind and sprinkled with chaat masala, a spice mixture that is itself wildly eventful. The contrasts are, as one fan said, “a steeplechase for your mouth,” with different sensations galloping by faster than you can track them.

All Indians in America are homesick for the same thing, said Mitra Choudhuri, a software engineer from Gujarat, who lives in Fort Collins, Colo. “There is no chaat here, only curries,” he said.

But in the New York region that has finally changed.

Thank God! Get the lowdown here.

Edward Wyatt writes in the New York Times:

In time, inevitably, cold truth is recast and reshaped into literature.

After three years of near silence about the attacks of Sept. 11, the literary world has begun to grapple with the meanings and consequences of the worst terrorist attack ever to happen on American soil.

A half-dozen novels that use 9/11 and its aftermath as central elements of their plot or setting, from some of the most acclaimed literary novelists and the most respected publishing houses, are being released later this year. A similar number have already made their way into bookstores in the last few months.

More here.

Brian Hayes reviews Symmetry Comes of Age: The Role of Pattern in Culture, edited by Dorothy K. Washburn and Donald W. Crowe, and Embedded Symmetries, Natural and Cultural, edited by Dorothy K. Washburn, at American Scientist:

On a visit to the Alhambra some years ago, I toted along a copy of Symmetry in Science and Art, a weighty text by A. V. Shubnikov and V. A. Koptsik, as a field guide to the carvings and tilings that decorate that extravagant palace overlooking Granada. The two books under review here would probably serve as better field guides—Symmetry Comes of Age even includes a useful flowchart for classifying the symmetry groups of patterns—but I suspect that the authors and editors would not entirely approve of this use of their work. The tourist who stalks the halls of the Alhambra trying to complete a checklist of the 17 two-dimensional symmetry groups is not their ideal student of “the role of pattern in culture.” When one is looking at an artifact such as a tiled floor or a woven fabric or a beadwork ornament, identifying crystallographic groups is at best the beginning of understanding the object. The classification might tell you something about the meaning of the work in the context of Western mathematics, but it is unlikely to reveal much about the object’s meaning within the culture that created it.

This point is made emphatically by Branko Grünbaum—a mathematician who certainly knows his symmetry groups—in a previously published article on ancient Peruvian textiles that is reprinted in Symmetry Comes of Age.

More here.