Steven Johnson in Discover Magazine:

Chances are, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve participated in a spontaneous mass audience on the World Wide Web. Someone somewhere decides to share something that catches your interest: a home video, say, of the tsunami taking out a beach resort. At first that sort of offering gathers an audience slowly. A few people send a link to friends, but soon the links become part of a positive feedback loop, and before long big media news sites have noticed the file, and the initial cluster of visitors becomes a swarm…

There’s a catch. Buzz about a new video clip spreads in a distributed way, but the process of viewing the clip remains defiantly centralized. The millions of people who heard about a tsunami video got word of it from thousands of different sources, but they all descended on a single Web server that hosted it. And when a million people all try to request a file from a server ill-prepared for the traffic, the result is like a thousand people showing up to take a ferry designed to hold a hundred passengers: Either most of the visitors get turned away, or the ferry sinks…

For some time now, there has been an ad hoc means of dealing with logjams created by spontaneous mass audiences—mirror sites containing copies of the original file. So when someone spreads news of a hot link, they typically offer a supplementary list of mirror sites in case the original is down. The idea is to manage the swarm by dispersing it.

An even better idea has emerged recently. Instead of creating mirror sites, some Webheads create a so-called torrent when a file is in great demand. That enables others to download the file using BitTorrent, a small but elegant program that actively encourages swarm formation and has a paradoxical effect. The more popular the file, the easier it becomes to download.

More here.

“Whatever you do, don’t forget your smart luggage – and never, ever meet in smart West End hotels. That was the top secret advice to would-be communist spies in a previously unseen handbook on surviving in 1930s London. The alternative tourist guide to London, compiled to aid infiltration into the UK, has been revealed amid hundreds of MI5 documents published at the National Archives.”

From a terrific BBC report.

Philip Ball reports in Nature:

Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia say that a ‘plasmonic cover’ could render objects “nearly invisible to an observer”. Their idea remains just a proposal at this stage, but it doesn’t obviously violate any laws of physics.

“The concept is an interesting one, with several important potential applications,” says John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College in London, UK. “It could find uses in stealth technology and camouflage.”

…The key to the concept is to reduce light scattering. We see objects because light bounces off them; if this scattering of light could be prevented (and if the objects didn’t absorb any light) they would become invisible. Alù and Engheta’s plasmonic screen suppresses scattering by resonating in tune with the illuminating light.

More here.

Ian Sample reports in The Guardian:

At the University of California in San Diego, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran noticed that a disproportionate number of patients – around a quarter – with a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy reported having deeply moving religious experiences. “They’d tell me they felt a presence or suddenly felt they got the meaning of the whole cosmos. And these could be life-changing experiences,” says Ramachandran. The feelings always came during seizures, even if the seizures were so mild, they could only be detected by sensitive electroencephalograms (EEGs). Between the seizures, some patients became preoccupied with thoughts about God.

Ramachandran drew up three explanations he thought might explain why the patients with epilepsy seemed so spiritual. First, he considered that the upwelling of emotion caused by the seizure might simply overwhelm, and patients made sense of it by believing that something extremely spiritual was going on. Second, the seizure might prompt the left hemisphere to make up yarns to account for seemingly inexplicable emotions. The ability of the brain’s left hemisphere to “confabulate” like this is well known to neuroscientists. Third, he wondered whether seizures disrupted the function of part of the brain called the amygdala which, among other tasks, helps us focus on what is significant while allowing us to ignore the trivial.

Ramachandran decided to test a couple of patients using what is called the galvanic skin response.

More here.

Telis Demos reviews No Place to Hide by Robert O’Harrow, in The New Republic:

To veteran Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow, September 11 was the tipping point in a battle for civil liberties. For decades, private companies and hush-hush government projects have been expanding and improving their ability to gather information about American citizens. When the planes hit the towers, the political will to use these capabilities was born, and since then a frightening new surveillance society has arisen, according to No Place to Hide. In anecdote after anecdote, O’Harrow details the incredible range and variety of information being collected, and how the FBI and other agencies have begun learning to put it to use. He explores new fingerprint and eye-scan technologies that the government can now match up to terrorist watch lists. He notes that the Department of Homeland Security has awarded record-setting contracts to private firms to analyze the disparate consumer data floating around, tag people who make suspicious purchases and travel arrangements, and create actionable police reports. O’Harrow recounts many instances where this information wasn’t used against terrorists but rather in routine police investigations, for which the post-9/11 intelligence reforms were never intended.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker:

In 1997, your cell phone could make two kinds of sounds. It could “ring”—our anachronistic word for the electronic trill that phones produce when you receive a call—or it could play a single-line melody, like “Für Elise.” If you’ve ever heard a cell phone bleep out Beethoven without the harmony, you’ll understand that this wasn’t much of a choice. At about this time, Nokia, the Finnish cell-phone company, introduced “smart messaging,” a protocol that allowed people to send text messages to one another over their phones, and Vesa-Matti Paananen, a Finnish computer programmer, realized that it would work equally well for transmitting bits of songs. Paananen developed software called Harmonium that enabled people to program their cell phones to make musically complex sequences—melodies with rudimentary harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment—that they could forward to friends using smart messaging.

…ringtones generated four billion dollars in sales around the world in 2004…In 2004, the Korean ringtone market was three hundred and fifty million dollars, while the CD market for singles was just two hundred and fifty million…

More here.

It’s the 25 anniversary (sort of) of The Clash’s London Calling (1979), one of my favorite albums of all time.  Stephen Metcalf reconsiders the significance of the album and the band in Slate.

With London Calling, the Clash merged the arty daring and political sincerity of the ’60s with the rage and trashy nihilism of the ’70s. Pop music has been many things since, but it has never again been as artistically and commercially dominated by rock ‘n’ roll. Now that London Calling is 25 years old, an anniversary currently being celebrated with a handsome box set and a lot of reverential air guitar, the time has come to think of their record as the lads intended: as the headstone for the rock era.

Why were the Clash so well-positioned to take punk rock beyond punk rock?

Farah Stockman reviewed Pakistan’s Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror by Hassan Abbas, in the Boston Globe:

Perhaps the biggest secret Abbas reveals is how this array of politicians, one after the other, betrayed the secular vision of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, to seek legitimacy and popularity through religious parties.

Abbas, a former Pakistani police officer and one-time adviser to the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, sheds light on mysteries that the vast majority of American readers have never wondered about: Why did Pakistan’s army launch an attack on Kargil Heights, a rocky crag in Indian-held Kashmir, just as peace talks between the two nuclear powers were making progress?

Why did Pakistan shuffle around the army command at a crucial point in a war with India? Was the United States behind the coup against Bhutto? Why did the unruly militant group Muttahidah Quami Movement, or MQM, split apart in December 1991 (“They gave ideological reasons as the cause of the split,” Abbas writes, “but the ISI,” the Pakistani intelligence agency also known as the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, “was behind the split.”)

Such insider stories have elevated this book to the bestseller list in India, where newspapers have carried some of its juiciest tales, but it’s harder to find in Cambridge, where Abbas is a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and a doctoral candidate at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

More here.

From the BBC News:

A palaeontologist has come up with a novel way of studying historical manuscripts, by treating them as fossils from an extinct species.

John Cisne, writing in Science magazine, says manuscripts from the Middle Ages have a lot in common with animal populations.

For this reason, he claims, he can work out how many copies of a manuscript once existed and how regularly they were destroyed, simply by applying a biological model.

Historians have cautiously welcomed this rare link between the arts and sciences.

More here.

From The Guardian:

America is a country that celebrates fakes and posturers, but Hunter S Thompson, who shot himself to death inside his walled compound, Owl Farm, in Colorado, on February 20, was the real thing. The genuine article, as he would have said; the real McCoy. He lived the life he wanted, as half outlaw, half hero, without any inhibition; broke the law when he felt it impinged upon him, was beholden to no one, shot holes in any fakery he found – either with a .44 Magnum or a breezy vocabulary; and he died the same way, at the moment of his choosing, probably in great pain from a variety of ailments – spinal injury, broken bones and psychic wounds. “Pain” in the metaphysical sense too.

More here.

Neil McCormick in the Daily Telegraph:

His greatest period of creativity certainly commences with Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, written in 1972. The Great Shark Hunt, published in 1979, contains his last work of any merit.

The 11 books Thompson published in the next 25 years were a patchwork of half-finished columns and poorly researched articles, the occasional flashes of brilliant prose serving only to illuminate his lack of coherent thought and the ever-dimming light of his genius. As he retreated from the front line of journalism, he became a freak show on the corner of American pop culture.

More here.

Jonathan Leake in London’s Sunday Times:

Once they were a byword for mindless docility. But cows have a secret mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited over intellectual challenges, scientists have found.

Cows are also capable of feeling strong emotions such as pain, fear and even anxiety — they worry about the future. But if farmers provide the right conditions, they can also feel great happiness.

The findings have emerged from studies of farm animals that have found similar traits in pigs, goats, chickens and other livestock. They suggest that such animals may be so emotionally similar to humans that welfare laws need to be rethought.

More here.

Will Englund in the Baltimore Sun (free registration required):

Reason has been taking a beating recently, and it’s not hard to see why. If Americans are flocking to religious faith, to revealed dogma, to creationism, to a place where no one pays any heed to a logic based on if x then y, it’s because reason gave us a world that hardly makes sense anymore.

Yes, I know – two centuries ago, America itself was a product of the Age of Enlightenment, and of a belief that people had it within their own power to make a better life for themselves, to throw off the shackles of superstition and build a more perfect union. And it nearly happened. Look what reason – as expressed through social, technological and scientific progress – gave birth to: the First Amendment, the Erie Canal, the cotton gin, the light bulb, the submachine gun, the income tax, the Model T Ford, the exit poll, the Edsel, the New Jersey Turnpike, the polio vaccine, the tonsillectomy, the nose job, death by lethal injection, and call waiting…

Let me ratchet this up a little. The Age of Reason may have reached its glorious acme in the late 19th century. But in some ways it started to go off the rails soon after. Reason said that humans could be bred like peas or hogs to produce a better specimen – a line of thinking that reached its logical conclusion at Auschwitz. Reason said that energy and mass are related – as the residents of Hiroshima were to learn. Reason said that history and economics were decipherable by way of the scientific method; thus Das Kapital , and thus The Gulag Archipelago.

More here.

The following obituary is from the Buffalo News:

Dr. Sabahat Ahsan of Amherst, an obstetrician who cared for indigent patients, died Tuesday in Erie County Medical Center after a brief illness. She was 66.

Born in Muzzaffarnagar, India, she graduated from Aligarh Muslim University and Gandhi Medical College.

She emigrated to Karachi, Pakistan, in 1962 and practiced obstetrics and gynecology there and in Lahore before coming to the United States in 1971. She settled briefly in Cincinnati before coming to Buffalo in 1972. She continued to visit Pakistan annually and remained devoted to its culture.

For 23 years, she took care of indigent patients at the East Side Health Clinic in Buffalo, choosing to do that over having a private practice.

She designed her ultramodern house and much-admired garden.

A lover of the arts, Dr. Ahsan patronized many cultural institutions in Buffalo and New York City.

She was married twice – to Mohammed Kamal Pasha from 1959 to 1967 and Dr. Syed Tasnim Raza from 1971 to 1996. A son, Farooq Raza, died in 1991.

Survivors include two daughters, Samina Raza-Eglimez of Amherst and Alia Raza of New York City; a son, Asad Raza of New York City; three grandchildren; two brothers, Wahid Mohammed of Buffalo and Ahmed Mohammed of Islamabad, Pakistan; and two sisters, Wajahat Fatima and Farhat Fatima, both of Islamabad.

Obituary and death notice here.

Sabahat Ahsan was the mother of 3 Quarks Daily editor (and my nephew) S. Asad Raza. You can read a moving tribute to his mother, that Asad gave at the memorial service, here.

Christo’s gates in Central Park will be taken down this weekend. Whatever one may think of them in the end, they did give us something to talk about for a while (see our earlier posts here, here, here, here, and here). Let me give the last word to Hal Foster, Townsend Martin Professor of Art at Princeton, writing in the London Review of Books:

‘The Gates’, the orange portals and banners that punctuated many of the paths in Central Park from 12 to 27 February, were greeted with great delight. People were first softened up by the numbers – 7532 portals, 5290 tons of steel, 60 miles of vinyl tubing, 116,389 miles of pleated nylon, 23 miles of trails, $21 million in costs – and then worked over by all the wacky presentations by the Bulgarian-born Christo and his French-born partner Jeanne-Claude (she of the punk-red hair). Contemporary art is big, bright, expensive and eager to please, right? So maximise these qualities, involve as many people as possible (640 paid workers to assemble the gates and 340 volunteer ‘ambassadors’ to open them), and you have a winning formula. Scale of work and size of audience will trump everything else (the hero of the piece might be the head engineer), and the piece will triumph as spectacle. If the actual location of The Gates was the park, its effective site was the global media (including the souvenir market online): that is to say, its site was everywhere.

But what if we consider the piece, perversely, in terms of the old criteria of colour and line?

More here. (Thanks to Setare Farz for bringing this article to my attention.)

George Packer in the New Yorker:

Whether the terrible violence in Iraq will grow even worse depends, in part, on the character of the country’s first democratic government. Its new leaders are already suggesting that Islam, in a rigid or sectarian cast, will not dominate Iraqi politics. This will provoke a conflict within Shiism, for Iraq has extremists of every kind, and it will not be smooth or easy, but at least it will be something other than a death struggle among Iraq’s Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Basra, where politics has begun to move fitfully toward a state that might someday be called normal, offers one model for a way out of the logic of civil war. “I will fight the terrorism of thoughts,” Majid al-Sary said, bringing his fist down on his desk. He was awaiting Youssef al-Emara, whose party had won the elections; they had made an appointment to continue their discussion that afternoon. “The elections showed the strength of religious ideas here. I will stay and fight those bad ideas. It’s changing from a fight against violence and explosions to a new category—thoughts.”

More here.

Michael Bond in New Scientist:

Palestinian Moien Kanaan and Israeli Karen Avraham are on opposite sides of one of the world’s most bitter conflicts, yet they are working together – under very different conditions – to uncover a genetic basis for hearing loss.

They are investigating the genes behind inherited deafness with Mary-Claire King at the University of Washington in Seattle, on a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Their collaboration is also part-funded by money from the Dan David prize, which allows a Palestinian from Bethlehem University to study in Avraham’s lab in Tel Aviv.

More here.

Shaoni Bhattacharya in New Scientist:

Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women – using landmarks to find their way around – a new study suggests.

But they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as using compass directions and distances. In contrast, gay women read maps just like straight women, reveals the study of 80 heterosexual and homosexual men and women.

“Gay men adopt male and female strategies. Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic,” explains Qazi Rahman, a psychobiologist who led the study at the University of East London, UK.

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times Magazine:

On the European front in the last months of World War II, the Nazis sent 350 U.S. Army prisoners of war to work in a concentration camp in eastern Germany. First on the list were all the American Jews they could find.

More here.

The first of a series of three articles by Dawkins to appear in The Guardian:

I am writing this on a boat (called the Beagle, as it happens) in the Galápagos archipelago, whose most famous inhabitants are the eponymous (in Spanish) giant tortoises, and whose most famous visitor is that giant of the mind, Charles Darwin. In his account of the voyage of the original Beagle, written long before the central idea of The Origin of Species condensed out of his brain, Darwin wrote of the Galápagos Islands:

“Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of [South] America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a little world within itself … Considering the small size of the islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range … we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”

True to his pre-Darwinian education, the young Darwin was using “aboriginal creation” for what we would now call endemic species – evolved on the islands and found nowhere else. Nevertheless, Darwin already had more than a faint inkling of that great truth which, in his mighty maturity, he was to tell the world.

More here.