Dinitia Smith in the New York Times:

Jacob Neusner, a mild-seeming, grandfatherly man relaxing in his easy chair, might have published more books than anyone alive. “As of this morning, 905,” he said recently. It was 4 p.m. The count was still good.

Hold it! Mr. Neusner, 72, a professor of theology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., has just called to say there are 924. This year alone there have been 22 books, most in his field, ancient Judaism. And no, he doesn’t count revisions or translations.

Mr. Neusner studies rabbinical writings of the first 600 years A.D., when rabbinic Judaism evolved. He has translated both the Palestinian Talmud (35 volumes) and the Babylonian, twice (second translation, 46 volumes). In fact, he has translated most of the ancient rabbinic literature. The Chronicle of Higher Education has called him probably the most prolific scholar in the nation.

More here.

Gregory M. Lamb in the Christian Science Monitor:

Most people think of placebos as harmless “sugar pills” given in clinic trials to some participants so that medical researchers can gauge the effects of the real drug on others. But in some trials, the “placebo effect” proves to be as strong as that of the drug. Consistently 30 percent or more of the subjects given placebos will show some improvement by taking the dummy pills.

So over the decades a small band of researchers has taken a hard look at those pills. Are they really effective? Should they play a role in medical therapy?

More here.

From the BBC News:

A gamma ray burst could have caused the Ordovician extinction, killing 60% of marine invertebrates at a time when life was largely confined to the sea.

These cosmic blasts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe.

The scientists think a 10-second burst near Earth could deplete up to half of the planet’s ozone layer.

With the ozone layer devastated, the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation could have killed off much of the life on land and near the surface of oceans and lakes.

More here.  And there’s more about gamma ray bursts at PBS’s Nova here.  [Thanks Robin.]

Anhoni Patel reviews Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame by Michael Joseph Gross, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Starstruck” analyzes the dysfunctional relationship between celebrity and fan. He interviews über-devotees and parties with the rich and famous and strives to provide insight into both worlds. The book covers several topics: the business of celebrity, the subculture of zealous fans, entertainment journalism and interpersonal connections made with luminaries. The two strongest chapters are those in which Gross profiles both Michael Jackson’s and Dolly Parton’s followers and makes a trip to the Sundance Film Festival.

There are tremendously engaging stories, such as that of Diana D’Alo, whose loyalty to the king of pop was unwavering, regardless of the fact that he was being arraigned on child molestation charges at the time she was being interviewed…

More here.

Via Brad Delong, the Left Business Observer’s founder and editor, Doug Henwood, has made his book Wall Street: How it Works and For Whom (New York: Verso, 1998) freely available online (contruibutions are requested).

THIS is a make-or-break year for Sudan, Africa’s biggest country. In Oslo this week, donor countries pledged $4.5 billion in aid to Sudan, but while I applaud the donors’ generosity, promises alone are not enough. . . .

In this watershed year for Sudan, it is vital that the international community move speedily to provide the resources to consolidate a fragile peace in the south, and to protect civilians from recurring violence in Darfur. We know what we need: money to help win the peace in the south, more African Union boots on the ground to help end the atrocities in Darfur, and political pressure to settle the conflict. It’s that simple, and that essential.

The rest of the op-ed at the NY Times is here. One could parse some of the language here and wonder why he wasn’t more explicit about who and what but it was a good thing for Kofi to do and it’s a tough job he’s got with the running the UN thing.

From MSNBC:

Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence. One day a similar engine might power a tiny mechanical doctor that would travel through your body in the ultimate house call. The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube.

The technique exploits the fact that surface tension — the tendency of atoms or molecules to resist separating — becomes more important at small scales. The motor, a surface-tension-driven nanoelectromechanical relaxation oscillator, was built by a team of researchers led by Alex Zettl at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although the amount of energy produced is small — 20 microwatts — it is quite impressive in relation to the tiny scale of the motor. The whole setup is less than 200 nanometers on a side, or hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. If it could be scaled up to the size of an automobile engine, it would be 100 million times more powerful than a Toyota Camry’s 225 horsepower V6 engine, the researchers say.

More here.

From Science Daily:

  A leading expert in artificial intelligence and neural networks, Robert Hecht-Nielsen argues that cognition in humans and many animals occurs in a very different, non-algorithmic and less complex way than has been widely assumed until now. The Hecht-Nielsen theory posits that all aspects of cognition – seeing, hearing, understanding, planning and so on – are carried out using a single type of knowledge (antecedent support) and a single information processing operation called ‘confabulation’ which is carried out between the brain’s cerebral cortex and thalamus. The scientist’s theory hypothesizes that confabulation is the only information processing operation used in cognition. The theory also explains the cognitive mechanism by which behaviors (thoughts and movements) are launched, moment by moment, throughout the day.

So what are the implications of the new theory for software makers? “The character of people working in software, at least those working on cognitive systems, will alter substantially,” said Hecht-Nielsen. “People from the communications department or philosophy will be more useful for building these systems than engineers who know how to program in C or Java. The utility of algorithmic programming in this kind of a pursuit will be marginal, because the new ‘brains’ will be machines with endless amounts of time, that will be able to de-bug endlessly.”

More here. (Thanks to my colleague and friend, Dr. James Rooney for bringing this article to my attention).

The Economist gives us an answer that it loves.

“One theory is that Homo sapiens had more sophisticated tools, which gave him an advantage in hunting or warfare. Another is that the modern human capacity for symbolic thinking (manifest at that time in the form of cave paintings and carved animal figurines) provided an edge. Symbolic thinking might have led to more sophisticated language and better co-operation. But according to Dr Shogren’s paper in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, it was neither cave paintings nor better spear points that led to Homo sapiens‘s dominance. It was a better economic system.

One thing Homo sapiens does that Homo neanderthalensis shows no sign of having done is trade.”

The al-Qaeda attack on the United States on September 11th, 2001 did much to realign political affiliations: Jude Wanniski writes occassionally for CounterPunch, Hitchens tours London with David Horowitz and Paul Johnson, not to mention how he turns his former comrades-in-arms into the targets of his famed and prodigous mad-lib like political verdict generator–the one that couples “soft”, “idiocy”, “cretin”, “nasty”, “stupid” with the target’s ethics, morality, judgement, imagination, and intellect. 

It once seemed to me that the aftermath of the attack for many on both sides of the spectrum was a return to an era when politics were clear–think the Spanish Civil War or the fight against the Nazis as the many “Bush=Hitler” signs suggest.  (It still does when the passions fire up.)  Enemies and enmity grew from the size of a louse to life-size to something world historical.  Here’s a piece by George Scialabba from n+1 that traces an evolution (or is it revolution?) of this sort in Hitchens’ thinking.  Somewhere in it seems to be a lesson about many on both sides.

“About any sufferings that cannot serve as a pretext for American military intervention, moreover, Hitchens appears to have stopped caring. . .  He is ‘a single-issue person at present,’ he wrote in endorsing President Bush for reelection. This issue, compared with which everything else is ‘not even in second or third place,’ is ‘the tenacious and unapologetic defense of civilized societies against the intensifying menace of clerical barbarism.’

. . .

Why? What accounts for Hitchens’s astonishing loss of moral and intellectual balance?

. . .

Randolph Bourne, criticizing the New Republic liberals of his era for supporting America’s entry into World War I, wondered whether

realism is always a stern and intelligent grappling with realities. May it not sometimes be a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal through a sheer fatigue from intellectual suspense? . . . With how many of the acceptors of war has it been mostly a dread of intellectual suspense? It is a mistake to suppose that intellectuality makes for suspended judgments. The intellect craves certitude. It takes effort to keep it supple and pliable. In a time of danger and disaster we jump desperately for some dogma to cling to. The time comes, if we try to hold out, when our nerves are sick with fatigue, and we seize in a great healing wave of release some doctrine that can be immediately translated into action.

Compare Hitchens’s widely quoted response to 9/11: ‘I felt a kind of exhilaration . . . at last, a war of everything I loved against everything I hated.’ More recently, explaining to Nation readers last November ‘Why I’m (Slightly) for Bush,’ he testified again to the therapeutic value of his new commitment: ‘Myself, I have made my own escape from your self-imposed quandary. Believe me when I say . . . the relief is unbelievable.’ I believe him.”

There have been a number of aticles about the current show at the Japan Society in New York entitled Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. Having just had a chance to see it, I couldn’t recommend it more. Japan’s can be a difficult culture to penetrate. I’m not sure full penetration occurs here, but it would be hard to see this exhibit without some flashes of understanding.

Here’s the NY Times review from Roberta Smith.

The work of Aya Takano sticks in one’s mind, to say the least. The picture on this post is from her illustration for Hiroshi Homura’s “Mail Mania Mami’s Summertime Move With Rabbit.”

I don’t normally post links to The Atlantic because their online archive is only available to subscribers. But, with apologies to non-subscribers, here’s an exception made for David Foster Wallace’s “Host,” a gigantic and brilliant dissection of right-wing radio, which also has an innovative hypertextual color-coded element for its footnotes. Let me plead with readers to pick up a copy of the April Atlantic just to read this article. There’s other interesting stuff in there too, like this ideologically-skewed Hitchens review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday.

Paper by Michael S. Franklin and Michael J. Zyphur in Evolutionary Psychology:

This paper presents an evolutionary argument for the role of dreams in the development of human cognitive processes. While a theory by Revonsuo (2000) proposes that dreams allow for threat rehearsal and therefore provide an evolutionary advantage, the goal of this paper is to extend this argument by commenting on other fitness-enhancing aspects of dreams. Rather than a simple threat rehearsal mechanism, it is argued that dreams reflect a more general virtual rehearsal mechanism that is likely to play an important role in the development of human cognitive capacities. This paper draws on current work in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind in developing the argument.

More here.

Simon Jeffery in The Guardian:

The American feminist icon, writer and campaigner Andrea Dworkin, who linked pornography to rape and violence, died at the weekend, her agent said today. She was 59 years old.

Her radical-feminist critique of pornography began with her first book, Woman Hating, published when she was 27. She campaigned frequently on the subject, helping to draft a law in 1983 that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women.

More here.

James Gleick reviews a biography of Oppenheimer in the Washington Post:

The atomic bomb would surely have come into existence without Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project, but the label “Father of the Bomb” could be attached to no one else. He felt his responsibility deeply. His self-lacerating conscience let him see with immediate and lasting clarity what his success meant for humanity. If he had done nothing else — if nothing else had happened to him — Oppenheimer would still be one of the 20th century’s great, complex, defining figures.

More here.

From American Scientist:

With the crowd going wild and sweat pouring from your every pore, you have to concentrate on the ball that is about to be launched in your direction. You must gather as much information about the pitch as quickly as you can in order to make crucial decisions.

As we will show, you get just a few hundreds of milliseconds to figure out what kind of pitch—perhaps traveling at almost 100 miles per hour—is heading toward the plate. In that instant, you must observe the ball’s spin and predict how it will move on its way to the plate. It’s a daunting computational task. Luckily, we can describe a few clues for you to use. And you will need them soon, because that fearsome pitcher is rocking back on his pivot leg. In a split second, his arm will swing through a great arc and send a baseball hurtling your way.

More here.

In the Village Voice:

With some high-profile releases in the past few years, increased press coverage, and tourist-friendly phenomena like Bombay Dreams, the Bollywood brand is quickly finding its place in American pop culture’s mainstream masala. Now, two uptown series attempt to flesh out the recent history of Indian cinema. Lincoln Center fetes mega-luminary Amitabh Bachchan, touted record-book-style as “the biggest film star in the world.” The title of Bachchan’s tribute is inspired by a 1999 BBC online poll that named him Superstar of the Millennium. Bachchan bested not only Sir Laurence Olivier and Charlie Chaplin but presumably Sarah Bernhardt and David Garrick; Bachchan’s sheer number of film roles—almost 150 since his debut in 1969—was no doubt a decisive factor. In his first hit, the violent revenge narrative Zanjeer (1973), the towering, baritone-voiced actor established the model for his later on-screen persona: the “angry young man” who takes on the powerful and unscrupulous but displays a charismatic decorum between smackdowns. In keeping with Bollywood’s market-friendly smorgasbordism, Bachchan served as Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, and Sylvester Stallone rolled into one.

More here.

Max Rodenbeck in the New York Review of Books:

An extraordinary passion play has been unfolding in Beirut over the last few weeks. It is a drama that happens to pit forces which, in a particularly stark fashion, seem to represent the competing narratives that will ultimately define the Arabs’ vision of their recent past and soon-to-be-revealed destiny.

More here.

Tracy Staedter at the Discovery Channel:

A physics class competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., has students making art out of invisible forces.

The Weird Fields contest, part of the undergraduate course “Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism,” — encourages students to use a special computer program that converts mathematical formulas into visual representations of electromagnetic fields.

The resulting swirls, loops, circles and squares, while not necessarily corresponding exactly to those occurring in nature, offer a creative way to understand some of the most abstract concepts in physics.

More here.