David Lodge reviews What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey, in the London Times:

Regular readers will know that John Carey is that rare creature, an academic who writes shrewdly, wittily and economically on a wide range of subjects in a style that non-specialists can understand and appreciate. There is a principle, central to the British tradition of philosophical discourse, known as Occam’s Razor, which forbids the unnecessary multiplication of facts. Carey’s favourite argumentative tool is more like a machete. He has a ruthlessly logical mind that cuts through obscurity, pretension, fallacious reasoning and unsupported assertion, and he has a knack of summarising and quoting from writers with whom he disagrees to devastating effect.

More here.

David Runciman reviews Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, in the London Review of Books:

What makes it so fascinating is that it is a mystery story. The mystery is this: how did the repeal of a tax that applies only to the richest 2 per cent of American families become a cause so popular and so powerful that it steamrollered all the opposition placed in its way? The estate tax was the most progressive part of the American tax system, because it rested on the principle that the wealthy few, if they were not willing to bequeath their money to charity, should not be permitted to pass it all directly to their heirs. It had been on the statute book for nearly a hundred years, and throughout that time it had been generally assumed that there was widespread support for the idea that unearned wealth passed between the generations, creating pockets of aristocratic privilege, was not part of the American dream. Because it was a tax that so obviously took from the relatively few to relieve the burden on the very many, there seemed no possibility that a sufficiently large or durable coalition of interests could ever be formed to get rid of it. Yet during the 1990s just such a coalition came into being, and not only did it hold together, it grew to the point where the clamour for estate tax repeal seemed irresistible.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The following tests were developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

Take the interactive empathy quotient test.

Take the interactive systemising quotient test.

Baron-Cohen’s theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. He calls it the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory.

Empathising is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. The empathiser intuitively figures out how people are feeling, and how to treat people with care and sensitivity.

Systemising is the drive to analyse and explore a system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and the drive to construct systems.

Read the full article here.

The tests work out your empathising quotient (EQ) and systemising quotient (SQ). The interactive version, which will calculate your results for you, requires Flash (version 5). Alternatively, the plain HTML version allows you to print off the questionnaire and calculate your own scores.

In either case, do both the SQ and EQ questionnaires then click on the link at the end for “your brain type”. This will tell you whether you have a male brain, a female brain or if you’re perfectly balanced.

Report your results as a comment on this post.

Liz Kalaugher in Nanotechweb.org:

Researchers at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories in the US have tested the adhesion of amino acids to semiconductors, metals and insulators used in electronic devices. The team used their results to design an inorganic nanostructure that selectively bound to a particular primary peptide sequence.

More here.

David L. Chandler in New Scientist:

A comet has been added to the list of potentially threatening near-Earth objects maintained by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Comet Catalina 2005 JQ5 is the largest – and therefore most potentially devastating – of the 70 objects now being tracked. However, the chances of a collision are very low.

The listing of Comet Catalina underscores the uncertainty in the knowledge of whether comets or asteroids pose a greater threat to Earth. Previous estimates of the proportion of the impact risk posed by comets have varied widely, from 1% to 50%, with most recent estimates at the lower end.

But comets are larger and faster-moving, on average, so their impacts could be a significant part of the overall risk to human life. And, unlike asteroids, they lie on randomly-oriented and usually highly elongated orbits. This makes them much more likely to remain undiscovered until they are very close to Earth.

More here.

W. Wayt Gibbs in Scientific American:

A growing number of dissenting researchers accuse government and medical authorities–as well as the media–of misleading the public about the health consequences of rising body weights.

Could it be that excess fat is not, by itself, a serious health risk for the vast majority of people who are overweight or obese–categories that in the U.S. include about six of every 10 adults? Is it possible that urging the overweight or mildly obese to cut calories and lose weight may actually do more harm than good?

Such notions defy conventional wisdom that excess adiposity kills more than 300,000 Americans a year and that the gradual fattening of nations since the 1980s presages coming epidemics of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and a host of other medical consequences…

More here.

Jim Rossignol writes:

Via Slashdot/science: a remarkable photo-essay recording the scrap-metal dealers of Kazakhstan, who trade the material from abandoned rocket booster stages that have fallen to Earth across their farmland.

A wonderful find by Jim – the pictures are equal parts magic and melancholy:

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

Going through “Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits,” the extraordinary exhibition that was at the National Gallery in Washington this winter and is now at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles until August 28, I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the daunting and sometimes baffling variety of Rembrandt’s painterly approach, which involves not only the brush bristles but also the palette knife and the wooden end of the brush and perhaps fingers as well. When the art historian Otto Benesch wrote about these canvases half a century ago, he described “a continuous vibrato of brushstrokes, flecks and scratches with the brush stick, nervous and utterly alive.” The secret of this aliveness has everything to do with Rembrandt’s unwillingness to settle on a method or a system. The protagonists in his late paintings–figures from the Bible or the classical past, or his contemporaries, or family members, or the artist himself–live in a world where all the old Renaissance oppositions between light and shade or volume and void, which had been set in a finely plotted perspectival space, have dissolved. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this dissolution and the revolution that it provokes have taken place at once, for we can feel a simultaneous thinning and thickening of the atmosphere, a fading of all fixed or known structures followed swiftly by the emergence of a new, shocking concreteness.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Pugnacious commentators Christopher and Peter Hitchens have not spoken to each other since a row over a joke about Stalinism four years ago. For this special issue of G2, produced live in Hay in collaboration with an audience of festival-goers, we brought the estranged brothers together to discuss sibling rivalry, politics and reconciliation. Just don’t ask them to shake hands…

Female audience member Excuse me. I’m not usually awkward at all but I’m sitting here and we’re asked not to smoke. And I don’t like being in a room where smoking is going on.

CH (smoking heavily): Well, you don’t have to stay, do you darling. I’m working here and I’m your guest. OK . This is what I like.

IK Would you just stub that one out?

CH No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it. If anyone doesn’t like it they can kiss my ass.

(Woman walks out)

More here.  [Thanks to Timothy Don.]

From CNN:

A British couple who hold the world record for the longest marriage said their success was down to a glass of whisky, a glass of sherry and the word “sorry.”

Percy and Florence Arrowsmith married on June 1, 1925 and will celebrate their 80th anniversary on Wednesday.

Guinness World Records said Tuesday the couple held the title for the longest marriage and also for the oldest married couple’s aggregate age.

“I think we’re very blessed,” Florence, 100, told the BBC. “We still love one another, that’s the most important part.”

Asked for their secret, Florence said you must never be afraid to say “sorry.”

More here.

John Tierney, in the New York Times:

“For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world’s 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.

The top players, both male and female, point to a simple explanation for the disparity: more men are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top. You need more than intelligence and a good vocabulary to become champion. You have to spend hours a day learning words like ‘khat,’ doing computerized drills and memorizing long lists of letter combinations, called alphagrams, that can form high-scoring seven-letter words.

. . .

The guys who memorize these lists have a hard time explaining their passion. But the evolutionary roots of it seem clear to anthropologists like Helen Fisher of Rutgers University.

‘Evolution has selected for men with a taste for risking everything to get to the top of the hierarchy,’ she said, ‘because those males get more reproductive opportunities, not only among primates but also among human beings. Women don’t get as big a reproductive payoff by reaching the top. They’re just as competitive with themselves – they want to do a good job just as much as men do – but men want to be more competitive with others.'”

From The National Geographic:

Fleet-footed animals, such as gazelles and cheetahs, aren’t the only livings things that rely on speed for their survival. The same is true for some plants and fungi.  Consider the Venus flytrap, the poster child for carnivorous plants: Its jaw-like leaves can ensnare insects in an eye-blurring one-tenth of a second. Other plants employ similar lightning-quick movements, if not to hunt, than to spread their seeds, squirt pollen, or shake off predators. Plants don’t have muscles. So how can some plants move so quickly?

Using the laws of physics, two scientists have detailed the mechanical design principles that govern these speedy plant moves. “To understand biology, it is always useful to come up with general principles as we have in this case,” said Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, a professor of applied mathematics and mechanics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mahadevan and his student, Jan Skotheim, report their findings in tomorrow’s issue of the research journal Science.

More here.

From The New York Times:

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior – compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops – that could almost be mistaken for psychosis. Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal. It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment. The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn.

More here.

India is emerging as one of the favourite destinations for health tourists in Asia with strengths in cardiac care, joint replacement and eye care. This is stated in an UNCTAD expert paper on General Agreement in Trade in Services (Gats). It said India attracted over 100,000 health tourists in 2002, most of whom had visited the country for cardiac care, joint replacements and eye care. Most of the visitors were from the Middle East, Britain and neighbouring countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan. Thailand is the top destination for health tourism receiving rich visitors from the US and UK. Thailand has strength in cosmetic surgery, organ transplants, dental treatment and joint replacements.

According to the paper, Indian health care providers (doctors, nurses, technicians) deliver services in the Middle East on short-term bilateral contracts. The service providers have had their training in developed countries. India has also emerged as the most important source country registered under the H1A category to the US. As many as 81,000 Indian nurses went to the USA under H1A visa as compared to 15,838 for China and 5509 for the Philippines.

More here.

From the AFP:

The ashes of legendary “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson will be fired from a cannon housed in a giant fist-shaped monument paid for by movie star Johnny Depp, a friend told AFP.

Depp, who played the counter-culture icon in the 1998 film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” is financing the 45-meter (150-foot) steel monument that will be the centrepiece of Thompson’s August 20 memorial service.

The service, to be held in the Colorado hamlet where the 67-year-old Thompson shot himself on February 20, will also be attended by Hollywood luminaries Sean Penn and Jack Nicholson, said Thompson’s friend Troy Hooper.

More here.

From Geotimes:

The spikes and plates of the Jurassic Stegosaurus may look like armor that could have staved off intrepid predators, but defense most likely was not their main purpose. According to new research, these bony growths on the back and tail were actually meant for species recognition — so that one Stegosaurus could pick his friends out of a crowd. “Paleontologists have been trying to determine what the plates and spikes of stegosaurs were for, for over a century,” says Russell Main, lead author of a new study published in Paleobiology this month. “The hypotheses have included defense, thermoregulation and display, [for] either sexual or species recognition,” he says.

In previous studies, scientists ruled out the defense mechanism as the primary function, as did Main, who is now a graduate student at Harvard University, and his co-authors Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley, Armand de Ricqles of the Collège de France, Paris, and John Horner from Montana State University in Bozeman, Mont. Although their fearsome appearance may have played an accessory role in protecting the large herbivores, upon examination of the bone structure of the plates and spikes, the researchers determined that the relatively light construction was not robust enough to act as a deterrent to predators, Main says. “

More here.

Raj Persaud reviews The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and his Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness by Jack El-Hai, in the British Medical Journal:

Aside from the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the US neurosurgeon Walter Freeman ranks as the most scorned physician of the 20th century. The operation Freeman refined and promoted, the lobotomy, still maintains a uniquely infamous position in the public mind nearly 70 years after its introduction and a quarter of a century after its disappearance…

But back in 1936, when Freeman performed his first leucotomy, the only alternative treatment for severe mental illness was prolonged institutionalisation, and the procedure did seem to liberate many patients from this fate. How else to explain why, in the United States alone, more than 40 000 such procedures would be carried out over the next few decades, and why it remained in use well into the 1970s?

More here.

Deyan Sudjic on the architectural predilictions of the powerful, and the architects willingness to service them:

I started to collect images of the rich and powerful leaning over architectural models in a more systematic way after I suddenly found myself in the middle of one. The elder statesman of Japanese architecture, Arata Isozaki, had hired an art gallery in Milan owned by Miuccia Prada, for a presentation to an important client. Outside, two black Mercedes cars full of bodyguards were parked on either side of the entrance, alongside a vanload of carabinieri. Inside was another of those room-size models. Isozaki described it as a villa. In fact it was a palace for a Qatari sheikh, who was his country’s minister for culture. And the palace had to do rather more than accommodate the sheikh, his family, his collection of rare breed animals and his Ferraris, his Bridget Rileys and his Hockney swimming pool, as well as his Richard Serra landscape installation.

Each piece of the building had been allocated to an individual architect or designer. Ron Arad was doing one room, Tom Dixon another, John Pawson a third. Isozaki’s assistants were marshalling them for an audience with the sheikh. The architects waited, and they waited, drinking coffee and eating pastries dispensed by waiters in black tie until the sheikh finally arrived, almost two hours late.

Here was the relationship between power and architecture in its most naked form, a relationship of subservience to the mighty as clear as if the architect were a hairdresser or a tailor. In fact the villa never got built, and the last report I heard of the sheikh was that he was under house arrest while police investigated details of his purchases of millions of dollars-worth of art on behalf of the government.

More on “The Edifice Complex” at this week’s Observer Review

Edmund Fawcett reviews Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence by Tim Parks, in The Guardian:

Despite the trail of financial and political failure they left, we remember the Medici with dazzlement largely for two reasons. One is that they were very good at landing on their feet. The other is they were brilliant at spin.

Their bank, which opened in Florence in 1397, lasted less than 100 years. Its glory days were over even before Cosimo, its most capable head, died in 1464. As money ran out, Cosimo’s successors, Piero the Gouty and Lorenzo the Magnificent, relied ever more on manipulating Florence’s superficially republican constitution to hold on to princely influence and power. When enemies united to banish the Medici in 1494, their bank was already dead in the water, victim of mismanagement and a wider banking downturn.

The Medici soon slipped back into Florence as puppets of the Habsburg dynasty. They employed artists, notably Vasari, to present the Medici as Florence’s natural rulers and its art as Italy’s best. The Medici now put their wealth into land, which they did little to improve, and married their daughters into the sovereign houses of Europe. They ruled without glory and often oppressively until the line died out in 1737…

More here.

Alex Ross in The New Yorker:

Ninety-nine years ago, John Philip Sousa predicted that recordings would lead to the demise of music. The phonograph, he warned, would erode the finer instincts of the ear, end amateur playing and singing, and put professional musicians out of work. “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he wrote. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”

Before you dismiss Sousa as a nutty old codger, you might ponder how much has changed in the past hundred years. Music has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disk; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with ten thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. In the future, Sousa’s ghost might say, reproduction will replace production entirely. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.

More here.