Kerry Sieh writes in Nature:

As the human drama of the Aceh–Andaman earthquake and tsunami unfolded in the last days of 2004, laymen and scientists began scrambling to understand what had caused these gigantic disturbances of Earth’s crust and seas. One of the earliest clues was the delineation, within just hours of the mainshock, of a band of large aftershocks arcing 1,300 km from northern Sumatra almost as far as Myanmar (Burma). This seemed to signal that about 25% of the Sunda megathrust, the great tectonic boundary along which the Australian and Indian plates begin their descent beneath Southeast Asia, had ruptured. In less than a day, however, analyses of seismic ‘body’ waves were indicating that the length of the rupture was only about 400 km.

This early controversy about the length of the megathrust rupture created a gnawing ambiguity about future dangers to populations around the Bay of Bengal. If only 400 km of the great fault had ruptured, large unfailed sections might be poised to deliver another tsunami. If, on the other hand, most of the submarine fault had broken, then the chances of such a disaster were much smaller.

It is sobering to realize that big earthquakes sometimes occur in clusters (for example, seven of the ten giant earthquakes of the twentieth century occurred between 1950 and 1965, and five of these occurred around the northern Pacific margin). Because many of the giant faults in the Aceh–Andaman neighbourhood have been dormant for a very long time, it is quite plausible that the recent giant earthquake and tsunami may not be the only disastrous twenty-first-century manifestation of the Indian plate’s unsteady tectonic journey northward.

Read more here.

Brian Chikwava in The Guardian:

As Zimbabweans go to the polls, one writer and poet they may do well to remember is the late Dambudzo Marechera. Marechera, who died in 1987 at only 35, was one of African literature’s most fascinating and unorthodox figures. He is, on a sunny afternoon, one of Africa’s first products of the post-modern condition; and on a damp morning, Africa’s first intellectual aberration. Such is the ambivalent nature of his work. After being expelled from Oxford University for his anarchist tendencies in 1976 and spending years on the streets with his rucksack and typewriter, Marechera returned to independent Zimbabwe in 1982 where he continued with his street life. His encounter with independent Zimbabwe was not a wholly comfortable experience for him. “I have been an outsider in my own biography, in my country’s history, in the world’s terrifying possibilities,” he once said.

More here.

Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:

The bits and pieces flying out from the high-speed collisions of gold nuclei at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island have not been behaving quite as physicists had expected.

According to one theoretical physicist, the collisions have even been creating a sort of tiny, short-lived black hole – very, very tiny and very, very short-lived. It lasts less than one-10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second.

And it’s not even really a black hole.

The black holes known to astronomers form when a star (or something larger) collapses and the gravitational pull grows so powerful that nothing can escape, not even light.

The Brookhaven mini-black hole, if it existed, would have nothing to do with gravity. Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC (pronounced rick) for short, accelerates gold nuclei – atoms stripped of their surrounding clouds of electrons – to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then slams them together, head-on.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

The proposed Human Cancer Genome Project would be greater in scale than the Human Genome Project, which has already mapped the blueprint of the human genetic structure. Its goal woudl be to determine the DNA sequence of thousands of tumor samples, the Times reported, Researchers would look for mutations that give rise to cancer or sustain it.

The project’s proponents say a data bank of mutations would be freely available to researchers.

More here.

Cristopher R. Brodie in American Scientist:

Richard Dawkins is the first holder of the newly endowed Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his award-winning popular science books, beginning with the best-selling The Selfish Gene in 1976 and including The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) and Unweaving the Rainbow (1998). An outspoken atheist, Dawkins is also a frequent participant in public discussions of science and religion. His latest book, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, is a backward journey through four billion years of evolutionary history to the origin of life, drawing insights from the “tales” of 40 creatures met along the way.

Associate Editor Christopher Brodie spoke with Dawkins by telephone in December 2004.

I want to talk with you a bit about The Ancestor’s Tale. What made you want to write a book that was more general than your other works, that encompassed ground that you’ve previously covered?

It doesn’t really cover previous ground. I’ve never written about the actual detailed facts of evolutionary history before. My previous books have all been attempts to make evolution easier to understand, to make theory easier to understand. This is the first book that really lays out the detailed facts of evolutionary history.

More here.

Dinitia Smith in the New York Times:

Robert Creeley, who helped transform postwar American poetry by making it more conversational and emotionally direct, died on Wednesday in Odessa, Tex. He was 78 and had been in residence at a writers’ retreat maintained by the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Tex.

The cause was complications from lung disease, his wife, Penelope, said.

“Visible truth,” Mr. Creeley once wrote, quoting Melville, is “the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things.” That was the goal of his own work – emotion compressed in short, sparse sentences and an emphasis on feeling.

Mr. Creeley wrote, edited or was a major contributor to more than 60 books, including fiction, essays and drama. He belonged to a group of poets – beginning with Modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and continuing through the Beats and the Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson – who tried to escape from what they considered the academic style of American poetry, with its European influences and strict rhyme and metric schemes.

The critic Marjorie Perloff called Mr. Creeley an heir to Williams.

More here.  And here’s Creeley’s poem, “I Know a Man”:

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, – John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

From The Economist:

QUOD erat demonstrandum. These three words of Latin, meaning, “which was to be shown”, traditionally mark the end of a mathematical proof. And, for centuries, a proof was exactly that: showing something by breaking it down into readily agreed-upon steps. Proving something was a matter of convincing one’s peers that it has indeed been shown—no more, and no less. The rhetorical flourish of a Latin epigram also has served to indicate that the notion of proof is well understood, and commonly agreed. But that notion is now in flux. The use of computers to prove mathematical theorems is forcing mathematicians to re-examine the foundations of their discipline.

More here.

Cosma Shalizi, whose return to blogging is most welcomed, points to an intriguing article by Lu Hong and Scott Page.

“We introduce a general framework for modeling functionally diverse problem-solving agents. In this framework, problem-solving agents possess representations of problems and algorithms that they use to locate solutions. We use this framework to establish a result relevant to group composition. We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly selected agents outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing agents. This result relies on the intuition that, as the initial pool of problem solvers becomes large, the best-performing agents necessarily become similar in the space of problem solvers. Their relatively greater ability is more than offset by their lack of problem-solving diversity.”

Walter Kirn in the New York Times Magazine:

…thanks to an almost certain new federal law that the president has vowed to sign, this ending is set to grow unhappier still — at least for a significant percentage of the one million to one and a half million Americans who file for bankruptcy protection every year and will, as early as this autumn, find it much harder to wipe clean their books and get back on their economic feet. For the credit-card issuers and consumer-finance companies whose well-financed lobbyists backed the bill (whose central provision requires bankrupt debtors with incomes exceeding their statewide median incomes to settle for long-term repayment plans), the results should prove more gratifying.

For a nation whose very founding can be viewed as an attempt to free itself from financial burdens thrust upon it by a distant ruler; for a government that is deeply in the red because of its own spendthrift ways; and for a political leadership whose emissaries have been pressuring other countries to forgive Iraqi debt, such a reform raises questions, to put it mildly.

More here.

Julia Blackburn’s biography of The First Lady of Jazz reviewed in The Guardian:

‘She could crack your skull with a riff’… Billie Holiday plays New York in 1942

In November 1956, Holiday was interviewed by Tex McCreary. She sounds heavy with alcohol and whatever drugs she might have been using, and the conversation is slow and awkward. The interviewer obviously feels it’s no good going on with the questions and she was in no fit state to sing, but he has a sudden inspiration. He asks her to recite one of her songs. “I want you to close your eyes, Billie,” he says, “and speak the words like a poet. What about ‘Yesterdays’?”

Without a moment’s hesitation she does what she has been told to do. She recites the words with an almost unbearable languor, but with all the power and authority of a great theatrical monologue. Her voice sounds like a song, so musical in its resonances that as you listen you seem to hear a band playing with her:

Yesterdays,

Days I knew as happy sweet,

Sequestered days,

Olden days, golden days,

Days of mad romance and love.

Then gay youth was mine,

Truth was mine,

Joyous free and flaming life,

Forsooth were mine.

Sad am I, glad am I,

For today I’m dreaming of,

Yesterdays…

So that is the sort of performance she might have given if she could appear before us now, and you cannot doubt that everyone listening to her would hold their breath in awe and delight.

Read more here.

Atul Gawande asks how much doctors should be paid, in The New Yorker:

For those who have Medicare—its payments are near the middle of the range—an office visit for a new patient with a “low complexity” problem (service No. 99203) pays $77.29. A visit for a “high complexity” problem (service No. 99205) pays $151.92. Setting a dislocated shoulder (service No. 23650) pays $275.70. Removing a bunion: $492.35. Removing an appendix: $621.31. Removing a lung: $1,662.34. The best-paid service on the list? Surgical reconstruction for a baby born without a diaphragm: $5,366.98. The lowest-paying? Trimming a patient’s nails (“any number”): $10.15. The hospital collects separately for any costs it incurs.

The notion of a schedule like this, with services and fees laid out à la carte like a menu from Chili’s, may seem odd. In fact, it’s rooted in ancient history. Doctors have been paid on a piecework basis since at least the Code of Hammurabi; in Babylon during the eighteenth century B.C., a surgeon got ten shekels for any lifesaving operation he performed (only two shekels if the patient was a slave). The standardized fee schedule, though, is a thoroughly modern development.

More here.

David Smith at Preoccupations brings attention to Geoff Holland’s important (but largely ignored by the media) work:

Geoff Holland emailed me yesterday:

In case this is of interest, here is an article just published by Irene Gendzier, Professor of History and Politics at the University of Boston, who specialises in the Middle East. This prelude to her latest book mentions our campaign in Britain to hold the US accountable for supplying Iraq with the materials which fuelled its biological weapons programme.

There are now 122 MP signatures on the current House of Commons Early Day Motion ‘Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and Iraq’ (EDM 303), tabled by Austin Mitchell MP. In the Scottish Parliament, where the same Motion has been tabled (S2M-2050) by Chris Ballance, 19 MSPs have now signed.

Many thanks to all who have supported the campaign by asking their MP or MSP to sign and in many other encouraging ways. If we have achieved nothing else, at least a few more people have given thought to this vitally important matter. For example, there have been more than 31,000 hits on the campaign website and there are now numerous links to this site on other websites.

And there’s more about Geoff Holland here.

Samuel Yates’s art project:

The artist will begin his search for “The Color of Palo Alto” by photographing every parcel of land in Palo Alto with a digital camera, five days per week, Monday thru Friday. He will alternate between 68 and 69 photos per day. The photographs will be taken alphabetically from the “A” streets through the “Z” streets from January 3 to December 30, 2005.

Together with artist Eli Schleifer, who wrote a software program for the project that finds the average pixel color of each digital photograph, Yates will find the average color of each neighborhood, street, and parcel in Palo Alto.

In a democratic manner, each parcel in the city will contribute one “vote” of color toward the final color of Palo Alto.

The average color of all 17,860 photographs will then become a paint color, to be referred to as “The Color of Palo Alto.” There will also be average colors for each neighborhood, street, and parcel in the city.

More here.  [Thanks to Alia Raza for sending me this.]

David P. Barash in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a devotee of behaviorism, radical or otherwise. Moreover, when I teach or write about animal behavior, I often counterpoise B.F. Skinner’s work in particular as the intellectual antipode of my own perspective, which emphasizes the importance of built-in, prewired, evolutionarily generated mechanisms. For Skinner and his disciples, living things (including human beings) are tabula rasa, blank slates upon which the contingencies of reinforcement write as they will, thereby constituting the crucial — indeed, the only — determinant of behavior: the experience of each individual…

Into my own comfortable conceptual dichotomy (“behaviorism bad; evolutionism good”), there came an apple of discord when I happened to reread Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, published more than three decades ago.

Please don’t misunderstand: I haven’t become a convert to behaviorism. But I have emerged with a deeper respect for B.F. Skinner and his work, and a recognition that in his legacy, not just evolutionary biologists but all scientists have a potent intellectual ally. His research didn’t encompass neurobiology, sociobiology, or, indeed, biology at all. But there is no doubt that he “did” science, and moreover, that he provided the rest of us with some conceptual tools and arguments that will help us along our way.

More here.

John Ezard writes in The Guardian:

Maps for Lost Lovers, which took Nadeem Aslam 11 years to write, was declared in San Francisco as joint winner of the annual Kiriyama award, which aims to raise understanding of the peoples of the Pacific rim and south Asian diaspora.

The novel is a combined love story and murder mystery set in a poor south Asian enclave where a local curse is “May your son marry a white woman”. It centres on Kaukab, a pious Muslim woman who relies on her faith to ease her feelings of estrangement from her homeland of Pakistan and from her husband and westernised children.

It dramatises both white and Asian racism and deals with arranged marriages and Muslim divorce. Aslam, 39, who won literary awards for his first novel Season of the Rainbirds, is the son of Pakistani parents who settled in Huddersfield in the 1980s.

Read more here.

John Roach reports in National Geographic News:

“I’m wide awake and ready to paint the house,” the 49-year-old Colchester, Vermont, resident said. “I don’t need a cup of coffee to get going, not at all. But between 4:00 and 5:00 [p.m.] you might have to nudge me with an elbow.” Middlebrook suffers from what is known as familial advanced sleep phase syndrome, or FASPS. Her body’s clock is out of sync with the sleep-wake rhythm most of the world lives by. She goes to bed each night between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. and wakes in the wee hours of the morning.

“The net result is you can feel very isolated,” Middlebrook said. “Who wants to party at three in the morning? Nobody I know, and I’m not headed to the local bar to see who’s still there.” Instead, she quietly cleans the house, makes breakfast, or cuddles up with a book.

About three-tenths of a percent of the world’s population lives like this, including two of Middlebrook’s sisters, her daughter, and her mother. “Their whole clock is shifted,” said Ying-Hui Fu, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. Fu and colleagues report in tomorrow’s issue of the science journal Nature on a newly discovered mutation to a single gene that they say causes FASPS. In addition to FASPS, four of the five individuals showed signs of depression, Fu said. “[The depression] is most likely caused by the same thing,” she said. “As we probe deeper into how this mutation causes sleep problems, it very likely will also give insight to how the mutation will cause depression.”

Read more here.

Kristen Philipkoski reports in Wired News:

One of the tiniest entities in the human genome is becoming a very big deal in biology, with implications for the treatment of cancer, diabetes and brain disorders. MicroRNA, or miRNA, was considered relatively unimportant less than a decade ago. The tiny bits of RNA play a part in gene regulation, which involves how and when genes turn on and off. When the human genome proved to have fewer than 25,000 genes instead of the 100,000 or so that many scientists predicted, gene regulation became the focus of much attention. Suddenly it wasn’t the genes themselves that held the most intrigue, but the things that influence their behavior and the proteins that the gene-regulation process produces.

MiRNA seems to stifle the production of proteins exclusively — a function opposite that of its better-known relative, messenger RNA, or mRNA, which translates instructions from genes to create proteins. Researchers estimate there could be anywhere from 200 to 1,000 miRNAs — the range is wide because miRNAs are so small, making them difficult to detect. Gary Ruvkun, a Harvard University researcher and pioneer of miRNA research, has called the tiny entities “the biological equivalent of dark matter, all around us but almost escaping detection.” In a paper published in the Jan. 14 issue of Cell, David Bartel of the New York University School of Medicine predicted that miRNAs could regulate 30 percent of all human genes.

Read more here.

Duncan Graham-Rowe and Bob Holmes in New Scientist:

It has cost $24 million and taken more than 1300 scientists in 95 countries four years to put together. This week, the first ever global inventory of natural resources was finally published. Its overwhelming conclusion: we are living way beyond our means.

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), approximately 60 per cent of the planet’s “ecosystem services” – natural products and processes that support life, such as water purification – are being degraded or used unsustainably. What is more, this degradation increases the risk of abrupt and drastic changes, such as climate shifts and the collapse of fisheries.

But amid the doom and gloom there is hope. According to the MA, which is backed by the UN, the World Bank and the World Resources Institute, there is still tremendous scope for action that could mitigate these problems. “The future is in our hands,” Robert Watson, MA project leader and chief scientist for the World Bank told New Scientist.

More here.

Izzy Grinspan in The Village Voice:

One of the toughest things about being a Jew in today’s America is that everyone assumes you are innately hilarious. It’s not the worst stereotype—better to be the comedians than the ones with the noses. Sometimes, though, it makes otherwise clever writers get lazy.

David Deutsch and Joshua Newman’s The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies is a funny joke in the form of a sloppy book. Jews, according to the book’s premise, are behind most of the major events in history, especially the catastrophic ones. The bubonic plague? Naturally. Feminism? Of course. September 11? You get the idea.

More here.

Sarah Boxer in the New York Times:

Do you remember Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 film “Powers of Ten,” in which the camera zooms back from the surface of the Earth to a far-off point in space? As the details of the planet recede and vanish, new features of the universe appear. Before you know it, you’ve been sucked into another order entirely.

Sometimes the Internet is like that. The traditional objects of culture – books, movies, art – are becoming ever more distant. In their place are reviews of reviews, museums of museums and many, many lists.

Ron Hogan, who writes a literary blog called Beatrice.com, recently began a second blog, Beatrix: A Book Review Review. He’s not the only one reviewing reviewers. The blogs Bookdwarf, Conversational Reading, The Elegant Variation, Golden Rule Jones, The Reading Experience and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind – all gloss, grade or review other people’s book reviews. On Gawker.com, a writer known as Intern Alexis reviews The New York Times Book Review.

More here.  And our own Morgan Meis had already proposed the Review of the Review Review here first!