Tom Hodgkinson reviews A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Fredrik Svendsen, in The New Statesman:

Lars Svendsen’s inquiry is a good, solid practical work of philosophy, in the tradition of Aristotle’s Ethics and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He has a light touch and a playful attitude, and draws on a wide range of texts, from Martin Heidegger and Samuel Beckett to Iggy Pop and the Pet Shop Boys.

The opening section is particularly strong. I was fascinated to learn that boredom was invented in 1760; the word is not found in English prior to this, though related concepts such as melancholy and acedia did exist. Acedia is from the Greek akedia, meaning “not to care”. Usually translated as sloth, it meant not so much laziness as a betrayal of your duty to observe God. The monk who gave up, who didn’t care, was committing possibly the most grievous sin of all, because not caring about God implied not caring about being lustful, avaricious or proud.

More here.

Vanessa Woods in New Scientist:

Would you donate more to charity if you were being watched, even by a bug-eyed robot called Kismet? Surprisingly perhaps, Kismet’s quirky visage is enough to bring out the best in us, a discovery which could help us understand human generosity’s roots.

Altruisim is a puzzle for Darwinian evolution. How could we have evolved to be selfless when it is clearly a costly business? Many experimental games between volunteers who have to decide how much to donate to other players have shown that people do not behave in their immediate self-interest. We are more generous than necessary and are prepared to punish someone who offers an unfair deal, even if it costs us (New Scientist, 12 March 2005).

To some, this is evidence of “strong reciprocity”, which they believe evolved in our prehistoric ancestors because kind groups did better than groups of selfish individuals. But others argue that altruism is an illusion. “It looks like the people in the experiments are trying to be nice, but the niceness is a mirage,” says Terry Burnham at Harvard University, US.

More here.

Emma Marris in Nature:

Wine enchants because of its complexity, but that very trait makes it difficult to regulate. That bottle full of aromatic red liquid with hints of cherry may be genuine Pinot Noir from the California coast, or it may be a New Jersey Merlot, diluted with water and tarted up with sugar or sophisticated synthetic flavourings.

In the arms race between the adulterators and the regulators, detection systems have become ever more sophisticated, as have the cheaters. But at least one common ruse – claiming that the wine is one variety, when it is actually entirely or partly another – may come to a sudden stop if DNA can be successfully extracted from wine on the shelf.

More here.

Stephen J. Dubner in the New York Times Magazine:

Roland G. Fryer Jr. is 27 years old and he is an assistant professor of economics at Harvard and he is black. Yes, 27 is young to be any kind of professor anywhere. But after what might charitably be called a slow start in the scholarly life, Fryer has been in a big hurry to catch up. He was in fact only 25 when he went on the job market, gaining offers from — well, just about everywhere. He abruptly ended his job search by accepting an invitation to join the Society of Fellows at Harvard, one of academia’s most prestigious research posts. This meant he wouldn’t be teaching anywhere for three years. The Harvard economics department told Fryer to take its offer anyway; he could have an office and defer his teaching obligation until the fellowship was done.

Now that he is halfway through his fellowship, the quality and breadth of Fryer’s research have surprised even his champions.

More here.

From the New York Review of Books:

“Now I realise for the first time,” wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the vantage point of his mid-fifties, “what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel.”

The disbelief Faulkner lays claim to is a little disingenuous. For the kind of writer he wanted to be, he had all the education, even all the book-learning, he needed. As for company, he stood to gain more from garrulous oldsters with gnarled hands and long memories than from effete littérateurs. Nevertheless, a measure of astonishment is in order. Who would have guessed that a boy of no great intellectual distinction from small-town Mississippi would become not only a famous writer, celebrated at home and abroad, but the kind of writer he in fact became: the most radical innovator in the annals of American fiction, a writer to whom the avant-garde of Europe and Latin America would go to school?

More here.

Michael Young of Lebanon’s Daily Star has a fascinating account of the mercurial Walid Jumblatt.

Asked whether it is true that he once with wicked humor offered the conservative Maronite Christian patriarch a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s leftist critique of the industrialized world, ”Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World,” Jumblatt answered yes and brought out two books he was currently reading. Both were utterly unexpected in that barren intellectual vale populated by most Lebanese politicians: ”At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” by Jean Amery, and ”The New Meaning of Treason,” by Rebecca West. He added that he is a great admirer of Robert D. Kaplan, whose hardheaded pessimism has so often been anathema to Jumblatt’s left-wing soul mates in the West. Jumblatt is forever complicating his secular, leftist image.

Jumblatt’s pragmatic ecumenism is common among Lebanese, which helps to explain why followers of Lebanon’s once-hostile militias have been demonstrating together against Syria since Hariri’s murder. Perhaps it is one reason that Christians have forgiven Jumblatt for what he did to them, even if they do not forget; another is that the Lebanese system of communal compromise is propped up by amnesia, necessary since few emerged from the civil war looking good. A third is that Walid Jumblatt, given his experience, versatility and influence, is perhaps the only national leader the opposition still has.

Toward the end of a lunch he was giving, Jumblatt ordered first one and then a second glass of liqueur. He was very tired, he said; the alcohol apparently was to help him nap. Friends say Jumblatt’s nights are sleepless. Walking an eternal tightrope does that to you.

If you’re wondering what a ‘Druze’ is I would recommend perusing the Institute of Druze Studies website at San Diego State University. There, among other things, you will find tantalizing bits of information like the following:

Although the structure of the Druze society helps unite them into a socially cohesive community, it also divides them into two main classes: “the initiated” known in Arabic as ‘uqqal, literally “wise,” who are familiar with the religious teachings; and “the uninitiated”   known as juhhal, or literally “ignorant” who are not initiated in the Druze doctrine. Only those members of the community who demonstrate piety and devotion and who have withstood a lengthy process of candidacy are initiated into the teachings of the Druze faith. Women may also be initiated in the Druze doctrine. The Druze tradition considers women to be more spiritually prepared than men to enter such circles because they are considered less likely to be exposed to deviant or immoral practices such as murder and adultery.

Jeff Zeleny reports in ths Chicago Tribune:

Obama has worked to navigate the complicated channel of etiquette in the Senate, a place that can be hidebound by its fusty conventions, protocol and feigned gentility. He has already had face-to-face meetings with 14 senators to seek their thoughts or offer his help. His political touch is nimble, his smile works overtime.

He was among the first to call Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) after she fainted while delivering a speech in late January. He reacted with humor when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) butchered his name during a speech at the National Press Club, saying: “Osama bin . . . uh, Osama” before finally settling on “Obama.”

And on a recent afternoon, Obama paid a visit to Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat first elected to the Senate in 1958 and the chamber’s resident keeper of the institutional flame. Sitting in Byrd’s library, Obama listened as his elder talked about protocol, history and regret.

There was Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan member, sitting with Obama, only the third African-American elected to the Senate. The meeting was private. But as Obama walked back to his office later that day, he said Byrd had talked about a mistake he made in his younger years “that is now the cross around my neck.”

“I said if we were supposed to be perfect, we’d all be in trouble,” Obama recalled, “so we rely on God’s mercy and grace to get us through.”

That he is even serving in the Senate with Byrd is no small feat of history.

Read more here.

Laura Spinney reports in The Guardian:

In one of his famous cartoons, American Gary Larson has cows standing about on their hind feet, smoking fags by the side of a road. One of them, the lookout, shouts “Car!” and by the time the motorist reaches them he gazes out on an idyllic scene of cows munching grass on all fours. The cows are doing cow things, and all is well with the world.

It’s a good joke, of course. Or maybe a dark reference to the not-so-distant past when Europeans – and some Americans – dressed animals up, put them on trial for heinous crimes and executed them, thereby judging them on a par with humans when it came to freely deciding their actions and being morally responsible for the outcomes. But new research suggests that animals have far more complex cognitive and social skills than we gave them credit for.

First for some findings. Last October, Ana da Costa and colleagues at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge reported that when sheep were isolated from their flock, they experienced stress as measured by increases in heart rate, stress hormones and bleating. But showing them pictures of familiar sheep faces reduced their stress on all three counts. The same effect was not produced when they were shown pictures of goat faces or inverted triangles. Other research has shown that if offered a choice of two feeding stalls, pigs will avoid the one they remember being shut into, previously, for several hours after eating, and go for the one they were released from quickly. Lame broiler hens, or hens bred for meat, will choose food laced with painkillers over food that is not. And rainbow trout will learn to react to cues that predict noxious stimuli, moving away from them to a different part of the tank.

Read more here.

Using laughter-provoking movies to gauge the effect of emotions on cardiovascular health, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore have shown for the first time that laughter is linked to healthy function of blood vessels. Laughter appears to cause the tissue that forms the inner lining of blood vessels, the endothelium, to dilate or expand in order to increase blood flow. When the same group of study volunteers was shown a movie that produced mental stress, their blood vessel lining developed a potentially unhealthy response called vasoconstriction, reducing blood flow. That finding confirms previous studies, which suggested there was a link between mental stress and the narrowing of blood vessels.

“The magnitude of change we saw in the endothelium is similar to the benefit we might see with aerobic activity, but without the aches, pains and muscle tension associated with exercise,” says Dr. Miller. “We don’t recommend that you laugh and not exercise, but we do recommend that you try to laugh on a regular basis. Thirty minutes of exercise three times a week, and 15 minutes of laughter on a daily basis is probably good for the vascular system.”

Read more here.

I am a huge fan of Jonathan Corum’s work at style.org. His two most recent projects are this interactive map of the Iraqi election results, with a “provisional mapping tool” you can use to adjust ratio of pixels to votes, and this wonderful tool which parses the statistical happenings of various keywords in the George W. Bush State of the Union speeches. It turns out that Bush is becoming more verbose – the average number of words in his sentences is steadily growing with each new major speech.

Joe Rao reports: Avid “Seinfeld” fans might remember the episode when Jerry’s friend, George, was desperately trying to find a way to postpone his impending Christmastime wedding with his fiancée, Susan. He finally comes up with a solution: Have the wedding on March 21 — the first day of spring!”

Unfortunately, if George had gone through with the nuptials (and Seinfeld aficionados know why he never did), he would have been a full day late. You see, in America, spring no longer falls on March 21. In 2005, for instance, the vernal equinox, the first day of spring for the Northern Hemisphere comes on Sunday, March 20, at 7:33 a.m. ET. Now this doesn’t seem right. I mean, when we were all growing up, the first day of spring was always on March 21, not March 20, right? Now, all of a sudden, spring comes on March 20.

The current seasonal lengths for the Northern Hemisphere are:

Winter	88.994 days
Spring	92.758 days
Summer	93.651 days
Autumn	89.842 days

As you can see, the warm seasons, spring and summer, combined are 7.573 days longer than the colder seasons, fall and winter (good news for warm weather admirers).

However, spring is currently being reduced by approximately one minute per year and winter by about one-half minute per year. Summer is gaining the minute lost from spring, and autumn is gaining the half-minute lost from winter. Winter is the shortest astronomical season, and with its seasonal duration continuing to decrease, it is expected to attain its minimum value — 88.71 days — by about the year 3500.

Read more here.

Bertha Pan’s film Face is now out, and it sounds very promising. From The New York Times:

“A meditation on the conflict between family loyalties and personal ambition, ‘Face’ is the kind of independent film that can feel slight on a first viewing. But like its original soundtrack — a streetwise blend of hip-hop, Chinese opera, and American and Asian pop songs — it’s likely to remain in your head long afterward.”

Andre Glucksmann writes of the assassination of Aslan Maskhadov.

The Russian authorities have succeeded. Their only opponent now is Shamil Basayev, the radical warlord they themselves trained and often spared, be it in Budyonnovsk or Dagestan. Mr Putin, the Soviet agent who spends his holidays in the company of Messrs Schröder and Berlusconi, finds himself faced with a man like himself, a man who may not have his clout yet, but already his cruelty. The massacre may now continue, the attacks recommence.

Aslan Maskhadov had just declared a unilateral ceasefire and announced he represented Western values, not those of radical Islamism. This ceasefire had been respected by all boeviki (Chechen fighters) for the past month. Maskhadov had shown his strength. The time had therefore come to kill him to prevent the spirit of “permanent revolution” – which our friend, the Czar, abhors – from reaching the northern Caucasus.

Not a single Western leader dared call for the Kremlin to negotiate with the only legitimate leader of a martyred and heroic people. Remember Ahmed Shah Massoud of Afghanistan? First he resisted the Russians, then the Islamists. He was abandoned by the world’s democracies and assassinated – to Osama Bin Laden’s benefit. There too, not one of our representatives contradicted Vladimir Putin when he equated Chechen pro-independence military resistance with international terrorism. On the contrary, Chirac and Schröder proclaimed the master of the Kremlin the archangel of peace in view of his sympathy towards Saddam Hussein, a blank cheque the KGB man has now cashed in.

Stripped of their morals, our leaders have also shown remarkable political stupidity. Who will now be able to calm the thousands of torture victims who dream of nothing but revenge?

Following up on my post from last week, the Hindustan Times reports that United States has denied Narendra Modi a visa for his planned visit.

“In a stinging snub to Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the US on Friday revoked his visa apparently because of Gujarat riots two days before his travel there, drawing strong protest from India which sought ‘urgent reconsideration’ of the ‘uncalled for’ decision.

Angry at the development, Modi said it amounted to an ‘insult to India’. He accused Washington of following ‘double standards’ and said the ground on which he had been denied visa was ‘baseless’ as no court of law in India or world had found him violating religious freedom.

The US Embassy said it had revoked Modi’s tourist/business visa and diplomatic visa under US Immigration and Nationality Act.

‘We confirm that the Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi applied for but was denied diplomatic visa under Section 214 (b) of the Act because he was not coming for the purpose that qualified for diplomatic visa,’ US Embassy spokesman said.”

George Kennan, the man whose strategy for containing Communism shaped much of the post-war world, has died.

“George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who did more than any other envoy of his generation to shape United States policy during the cold war, died on Thursday night in Princeton, N.J. He was 101.

Mr. Kennan was the man to whom the White House and the Pentagon turned when they sought to understand the Soviet Union after World War II. He conceived the cold-war policy of containment, the idea that the United States should stop the global spread of Communism by diplomacy, politics, and covert action – by any means short of war.

As the State Department’s first policy planning chief in the late 1940’s, serving Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Mr. Kennan was an intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, which sent billions of dollars of American aid to nations devastated by World War II. At the same time, he conceived a secret ‘political warfare’ unit that aimed to roll back Communism, not merely contain it. His brainchild became the covert-operations directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The Youth Movement continues in New York arts.

The second “Greater New York,” the youth-besotted, cheerful, immodestly ingratiating jumbo survey of contemporary art, has opened to the predictable mobs at P.S. 1 in Queens. It roams from roof to basement, weaving in stairwells, a ramshackle behemoth. . . .

The show peruses a scene whose wide stylistic range, persistent teenage infatuations and overall dexterousness are firmly entrenched characteristics of the marketplace. Craft and finesse are de rigueur. Descendants of Amy Sillman, Shahzia Sikander and Elizabeth Peyton perform ever-greater feats of willowy elegance. Gallerists and their client pools of hedge-fund optimists, competing for the latest hot list, troll university campuses for budding talents. Last time, there were hardly enough Chelsea galleries to go around. Now there aren’t enough artists. Some of the show’s wall labels, I noticed, have galleries hastily scrawled in pen, as if the artists, buoyed by their inclusion here, were suddenly snatched up in the interval between printing and pasting up the names.

A. S. Byatt’s encounters with science shape the story and characters in her four-part series of novels.

I realized, one idle morning, that a snail in Latin is helix. And a snail’s shell is in the form of a spiral. Later I discovered that there were two species of snail, Helix hortensis and Helix nemoralis (the snails of the garden and the grove), that could be fitted into both my paradise garden imagery and my realist scientific tale. By pure luck I met Steve Jones, an evolutionary biologist at University College London, on a science radio programme (we were actually talking about Marcel Proust and the concept of time in physics). I discovered that Steve was the world expert on what had (unfortunately for my verbal web) been renamed Cepaea hortensis and Cepaea nemoralis. He had been studying the genetics of the external spiral of colours on the shells of the snails — work which the discovery of methods to extract DNA had rendered redundant. Novelists invent facts because of intellectual needs. I later asked Steve if he could see any connection at all between snails and work on neurons in the brain, on memory: he said that snails had giant neurons which made them peculiarly apt for this kind of experiment. I had an imagined woman scientist whom I needed to move from snail genetics to neuroscience. Curiosity is a profound drive in both novelists and scientists. I took great pleasure in learning about snails.

The other spiral that obsessed me was the Fibonacci spiral. It seemed to my non-mathematical brain a thing that could be made as a word game: take a number, add it to itself, the next number is the sum of the previous two, and so on. But this spiral informed (to use an old seventeenth-century word for shaping from within, like the soul in the body) all sorts of natural phenomena, from climbing plants to the sprouting of twigs round stems, from snails to pine cones and sunflowers. I discovered that Alan Turing had been obsessed by explaining this and had not had the computers to do it. I met John Maynard Smith at a Darwin seminar at the London School of Economics and Political Science and he sent me a paper by two French scientists in which they work out the maths and the mechanics of growth in biological Fibonacci spirals. I cannot really understand it, but I do try. I felt that the Fibonacci spiral was an example of a platonic order — a sense that an invisible mathematical order informed all our physical accidental world. My fearful mathematician at the end of the third novel moves from studying the computer as a brain to studying this spiral. This is for him a kind of paradisal completeness.

Read more in Nature here.

Rachel Donadio in the New York Times:

In 1937, H. L. Mencken offered some advice to the son of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. ”My guess is you’d have more fun at Yale than at Princeton, but my real choice is Harvard,” he wrote. ”I don’t think Harvard is a better university than the other two, but it seems that Americans set a higher value on its A.B. If I had a son I’d take him to Cambridge and chain him to the campus pump to remain there until he had acquired a sound Harvard accent. It’s worth money in this great free Republic.”

And so it is. No university occupies a more central place in the American imagination than Harvard. In ”The Sound and the Fury,” the Compson family sells an inheritance of pastureland to send their son Quentin north to Harvard. His experience there, albeit fictional, does not become the stuff of university promotional materials. Bedeviled by a Southern past at odds with the secure respectability that Harvard promises to confer, Quentin cracks up and drowns himself in the Charles River. ”Harvard my Harvard boy Harvard harvard,” he daydreams at one point. Repeated over and over, the word is reduced to syllables, those syllables to nothing.

Harvard, boy, Harvard. What is Harvard? That question has come to the fore more than ever during the tumultuous presidency of Lawrence H. Summers. A brilliant economist who took office in 2001, Summers has become known for his brutally direct leadership style. As one joke circulating has it, he opens his mouth only to change feet.

More here.

Michelle Pauli in The Guardian:

Einstein may not seem like an obvious muse for poets, but he inspired Terry Pratchett to celebrate the fact that he had “worlds enough and time / to spare an hour to find a rhyme” and Sir Patrick Moore to ponder on “the deep futility of all ephemeral things”.

They were among the authors and experts who were invited by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA) to celebrate national science week and Einstein year by writing a poem based around the work of the famous physicist.

The competition was also open to the public, and the winners were announced today, with the adult prize going to a versified imaginary conversation with Einstein.

Gordon Judge’s poem, which manages to include the legendary equation E=mc2, begins

I once saw Einstein on a train
Which whistled past our station.
‘Your clock ticks much too slow,’ I yelled.
‘Ach, nein. That’s time dilation

and goes on to provide an ‘idiot’s guide’ to the theory of relativity in four-line stanzas.

More here.  And read the winning poems here.  It truly is an “idiot’s guide” since Gordon Judge already gets the science wrong in the second stanza, I just noticed (and too bad no one at the BA did):

“I’m travelling near the speed of light
(A trick I’ve learned to master).
To me, your clock goes much too quick –
You’re getting older, faster!”

On the contrary, to Einstein, Gordon’s clock would also be slowed for symmetrical reasons (to each observer, the other’s clock appears slow).

John Leonard on Jonathan Letham in the New York Review of Books:

In The Fortress of Solitude, his great white whale of a novel, Jonathan Lethem chases after childhood, neighborhood, and the American leviathan of race relations. In Men and Cartoons, a grab bag of his stories, he paddles a kayak downstream over waters not exactly rapid. Old friends from elementary school reappear in order to deplore the compromises and corruptions of their former classmates. Bygone parents are revealed to have been capable of secret, sexual exultations. Young lovers in a burgled house go to bed with the ghosts of past relationships made visible by a magic spray. Artists, agents, editors, opticians, and a talking sheep named Sylvia Plath negotiate dystopias of gridlock. In “Access Fantasy,” one character lives in his car in a city-wide traffic jam on the wrong side of a One-Way Permeable Barrier.

But the joke’s on Hemingway. According to Lethem, men without women employ comic books to compensate for their absence. When his characters aren’t listening to Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads, or dreaming up scenarios for interactive video games, or hiring out as “advertising robots” at the local Undermall, or destroying the world with air bags made of cabbages, they are thinking about Stan Lee and R. Crumb, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, and Captain America. If Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Walt Whitman, and Carl Jung show up in “Super Goat Man,” the most ambitious of these stories, they are really only red herrings or highbrow beards in an epic tale of an Electric Comics superhero from the Sixties who is reduced in the Eighties to teaching a college seminar on “Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955–1975.”

More here.