Dylan Evans in The Guardian:

It all started with Stephen Hawking, whose first popular book, A Brief History of Time, hit the bookshops in 1988. Very soon, others (myself included) jumped on the bandwagon, and popular science soon gained its own section in many bookshops.

With the boom, inevitably, there came a torrent of rubbish. The stylistic innovations of the trendsetters soon became, in the hands of the disciples, stale recipes, recycled over and over in formulaic and uninspiring ways. Even the titles began to seem repetitive: The Panda’s Thumb, Galileo’s Finger, Einstein’s Brain … What a pity nobody had the chutzpah to write a book about Newton’s penis.

A decade and a half later, there are signs that the popular science boom is running out of steam.

More here.

Alan Boyle reports for MSNBC:

You’d think explaining the beginnings of the universe would be enough for astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. But no: In “Origins,” a new book and public-TV miniseries, the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium goes beyond the Big Bang to take on the rise of the solar system, life and intelligence as well. Any one of those subjects is worthy of being covered in a documentary series at least as ambitious as “Origins,” which premieres Tuesday and Wednesday on PBS. And indeed they have been, in productions ranging from “Evolution” to “Life Beyond Earth” to the granddaddy of them all, Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.”

So why is Tyson tying all these cosmic subjects together in a four-hour package? He says that’s the very point he’s trying to bring home. “Only in the last five years have there been the right kinds of advances in the right kinds of fields to be able to do a miniseries on origins,” he told MSNBC.com. “This is ‘Origins’ with a big O, so it’s not just origins of human beings. This is origins of the whole shebang.” Tyson shows how scientists are blending astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and even paleontology to knit together insights about the structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself.

Read more here.

One of the most consistently interesting and eccentric arts collectives in New York City is called The Flux Factory. Headed by the polymathic Morgan Meis, Flux comprises a large gang of diversely talented artists who, in addition to regularly putting up beautifully-curated shows in their own space (a former factory), have graced the city with lovely thought-provoking performances and happenings. Some of my favorites have been: Counter Culture, The Impossible Tea Party, and Classics on Tape. Their recent curated shows have included: Absolute Zero Nowhere, Cute and Scary, What the Book?, and the edible exhibit, All You Can Art.

[Disclosure: Morgan is a 3 Quarks Daily editor, and I am on the advisory board of Flux.]

Holland Cotter writes on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Arts Section:

Maybe because Queens has no cultural center – or rather because it has several, but spread miles apart – it has become the home of many of those self-created communities known as artists’ collectives. One, Flux Factory, occupies a floor in a converted factory in Long Island City, an environment that feels a little like a cross between a youth hostel and a space station.

Much of their work is conceptual and performance based, as was the case in a three-month residency they did a few years ago at the Queens Museum of Art. Wearing bright orange coveralls, they clocked in every morning and more or less made up their work as they went. They began with an empty gallery and continually modified the space with gridlike screens and temporary barriers while doing their own projects: making collages, tabulating statistics, building contraptions. The result was a single installation, an accumulation of accumulations, a combination of theater, child’s play and ritual, a Rube Goldbergian version of everyday life.

This May they will present “Novel: A Living Installation Flux Factory,” in which three novelists – Laurie Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Baille – will live on-site, dining together, giving weekly public readings and trying to complete their novels by June 4. The point? To present the act of writing as both the private activity and audience-conscious public performance that it is. To suggest that art is always an activity as much as a product, and that any activity can be art. And to remind us that all of art’s sacred-cow concepts – creativity, inspiration, solitary genius – are fit subjects for laboratory testing.

Read the full article here. Morgan published a delightful piece in Harper’s Magazine about their 3-month project at the Queens Museum of Art entitled “The Devil’s Work,” which you can, and should, read here. Finally, Flux is known for their amazing parties, and there is one tonight: Flux Valley High’s Prom Night. If you live in NYC, come by. Oh, and for more information, here is the Flux Factory website.

Alex Beam writes in his column at the Boston Globe:

A new microgenre of what passes for literature has appeared on the scene: the omnididact’s tale.

Perhaps because everyone feels so stupid, we witness the impulse to get smarter, preferably by reading one book. A tongue-in-cheek version of this quest unfolds in A.J. Jacobs’s recent outing, ”The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.” The New York Times called Jacobs’s journey through the 44-million-word Encyclopedia Britannica ”mesmerizingly uninformative.”

The widely admired Bill Bryson swung at a similar pitch not so long ago, in ”A Short History of Nearly Everything.” The casual observer might be forgiven for confusing Bryson’s self-described ”intellectual odyssey of a lifetime” with science writer Timothy Ferris’s ”The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report,” a book that purported to ”summarize what we know about the cosmos and how we know it.”

More here.

David S. Goodsell reviews Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life, by Richard A. L. Jones, at American Scientist:

Richard A. L. Jones, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sheffield, has provided a new entry to the burgeoning literature on nanotechnology. In Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life, he touches on a variety of subjects in this ever-widening field. These include, to use his classification, top-down methods (such as photolithography of silicon), which are now reaching nanoscale levels; bionanotechnology, “the ‘Mad Max’ or ‘Scrap-heap challenge’ approach to nano-engineering”; biomimetic nanotechnology, which takes its lead from biology but uses the tools of chemistry for construction; and the “radical nanotechnology” of mechanosynthesis in the style of K. Eric Drexler (author of the influential 1986 book Engines of Creation).

Like a knowledgeable host making dinner conversation, Jones moves from topic to topic with a stream of lively banter. We ask “What is it like down there?” and our host tells us about Brownian motion and dispersion forces, using Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage to spice up the conversation.

More here.

The promise of Internet commerce has been easing matching, lowering search costs, and allowing new entrants access to larger markets by de-territorializing them.  While there are Internet banks, this model of consumer borrowing is new and perhaps the beginning of a real revolution in finance.

“This week saw the latest twist on what’s come to be known as the ‘eBay model’ with the launch of Zopa [in the UK] – an online loans service that works in a similar way. Anyone with some spare cash can offer it up for a loan, through Zopa. Lenders set their own interest rates and can choose which borrowers to lend to, based on their credit rating.

Borrowers, meanwhile, can pick a rate that’s right for them and because Zopa is simply assisting the transaction, not lending its own assets, it claims to take a smaller cut (1% of the amount borrowed) than a bank. Safeguards are built in to help prevent lenders being fleeced and the whole outfit is sanctioned by the FSA – Britain’s financial services watchdog.”

Holy hell, this parody of David Horowitz’s Discover the Network is funny. Check out my favorite little fascists, Darkseid and Cylon Centurion. I believe it’s the creation of John Holbo, one of the Crooked’st Timbers, and was brought to my attention via reading the great blog Chez Nadezhda.

From Science Editor Alan Boyle’s weblog:

At one time or another, everyone’s had a tune pop into their head and stay there, even though you wish it would just go away. Those meddlesome melodies are known as sticky songs, or “earworms,” and over the past couple of years, hundreds of Cosmic Log readers have sent in contributions to the earworm list. In Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, researchers report that they have discovered the place in the brain where earworms hide out. It should come as little surprise that the center for earworm activity is the auditory cortex, the same place where sounds are perceived.

Researchers from Dartmouth College and the University of Aberdeen worked with 15 experimental subjects to develop individualized playlists — including songs with lyrics, such as the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” as well as instrumental pieces such as the theme from “The Pink Panther.” (Are those earworms working on you yet?)

Each listener tagged certain tunes as familiar, and others as unfamiliar. Then the tunes were played while the listener was lying in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. At various points in the soundtrack, the music went silent for 3 to 5 seconds, and researchers watched how the brain responded.

During the gaps in the unfamiliar music, activity in the auditory cortex diminished. But when there was a gap in a familiar tune, the auditory cortex kept working away. “It’s like the brain is still hearing the music,” one of the researchers, Dartmouth’s David Kraemer, told me today. “It’s still activating that part of the brain that’s activated when you’re hearing the music. … And it’s interesting to note that we didn’t instruct them to imagine the silent part. It’s something that they just did spontaneously.”

The researchers also saw a difference between the vocals and the instrumentals: Songs with lyrics activated an area known as the auditory association cortex, or Brodmann’s area 22 — which links sounds with other aspects of experience, such as word recognition. The instrumental tunes sparked a more basic level of processing in the primary auditory cortex. Kraemer speculated that when you hear a song with words, you use the words as a shorthand for the full melody — while a wordless melody forces your brain to go farther back to the notes themselves. “You react only as far back as you need to, to reconstruct the relevant part of the experience,” he said. Perhaps this explains why songs with lyrics tend to be “stickier” than instrumental tunes, and why it’s so hard to stop an earworm in its tracks. Your auditory cortex wants to run through the entire experience of “Who Let the Dogs Out,” even though the rest of your brain is longing to stop the music.

Read more here.

Doug Stewart writes in Smithsonian Magazine:

Late in 1919, in a squalid Paris studio strewn with wine bottles, Amedeo Modigliani painted a wistful portrait of his 21-year-old lover Jeanne Hébuterne. A few months later, on January 24, 1920, the impoverished artist died of tubercular meningitis at age 35. The following evening, Hébuterne, eight months’ pregnant with their second child, leapt to her death from a fifth-story window.

During Modigliani’s short and difficult life, the going rate for his elegant, oddly distorted paintings was less than $10, and takers were few. A landlord who confiscated some of his work in lieu of rent used the canvases to patch old mattresses. This past November an anonymous bidder at Sotheby’s auction house in New York City paid $31.3 million for the Hébuterne portrait.

One of the many ironies of Modigliani’s career is that so tortured a life could produce so serene a body of work. His art managed to bridge the stylistic chasm between classical Italian painting and avant-garde Modernism.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt writes in Space.com:

Space weather forecasters have it even tougher than regular weather forecasters. In trying to predict long-range solar activity, they have to rely on a picture of just the half of the Sun they can see. Storms brewing on the backside are hidden from view until they rotate to the front.

Jupiter to the rescue. The giant gas planet reflects solar activity, scientists have learned. And when Jupiter is on the other side of the solar system, it can act as a mirror for flare-ups from the back side of the Sun.

Scientists had previously measured X-rays emanating from the Jovian atmosphere. Those coming from the equator were theorized to be related to solar activity.

More here.

This article wouldn’t normally pass muster for inclusion here at 3QD, lacking as it may be in intellectual depth. I don’t care. If I can help a single Pakistani or Indian New Yorker find chaat somewhere, I will no doubt be alloted at least 36 virgin brides in heaven. For some unfathomable reason, chaat is impossible to make well at home. There are millions of recipes floating around, but it just doesn’t come out right. In Pakistan, it is best bought from the filthy cart of a street vendor, and best swallowed along with a prophylactic dose of Cipro. Trust me, it is worth the Delhi-belly. I have been trying to explain to people what chaat is for some time, and trying to describe its incomparable simultaneous explosion of a million flavors and crispy textures on the palate, always without success. Finally, we have a professional to do the job.

Julia Moskin writes in the New York Times:

Asking Indians in America about chaat, India’s national snacks, is like asking Americans in India about burgers: the word unleashes unbearable cravings, nostalgia and homesickness. “I remember going to Kwality Snacks for papri chaat when I was a boy,” said Gandar Nasri, 74, a retired New York City taxi driver, who moved from Delhi in 1955. “Nothing will ever taste like that again.”

Taste a good chaat, and you understand why it is not soon forgotten.

Chaats are jumbles of flavor and texture: sweet, sour, salty, spicy, crunchy, soft, nutty, fried and flaky tidbits, doused with cool yogurt, fresh cilantro and tangy tamarind and sprinkled with chaat masala, a spice mixture that is itself wildly eventful. The contrasts are, as one fan said, “a steeplechase for your mouth,” with different sensations galloping by faster than you can track them.

All Indians in America are homesick for the same thing, said Mitra Choudhuri, a software engineer from Gujarat, who lives in Fort Collins, Colo. “There is no chaat here, only curries,” he said.

But in the New York region that has finally changed.

Thank God! Get the lowdown here.

Edward Wyatt writes in the New York Times:

In time, inevitably, cold truth is recast and reshaped into literature.

After three years of near silence about the attacks of Sept. 11, the literary world has begun to grapple with the meanings and consequences of the worst terrorist attack ever to happen on American soil.

A half-dozen novels that use 9/11 and its aftermath as central elements of their plot or setting, from some of the most acclaimed literary novelists and the most respected publishing houses, are being released later this year. A similar number have already made their way into bookstores in the last few months.

More here.

Brian Hayes reviews Symmetry Comes of Age: The Role of Pattern in Culture, edited by Dorothy K. Washburn and Donald W. Crowe, and Embedded Symmetries, Natural and Cultural, edited by Dorothy K. Washburn, at American Scientist:

On a visit to the Alhambra some years ago, I toted along a copy of Symmetry in Science and Art, a weighty text by A. V. Shubnikov and V. A. Koptsik, as a field guide to the carvings and tilings that decorate that extravagant palace overlooking Granada. The two books under review here would probably serve as better field guides—Symmetry Comes of Age even includes a useful flowchart for classifying the symmetry groups of patterns—but I suspect that the authors and editors would not entirely approve of this use of their work. The tourist who stalks the halls of the Alhambra trying to complete a checklist of the 17 two-dimensional symmetry groups is not their ideal student of “the role of pattern in culture.” When one is looking at an artifact such as a tiled floor or a woven fabric or a beadwork ornament, identifying crystallographic groups is at best the beginning of understanding the object. The classification might tell you something about the meaning of the work in the context of Western mathematics, but it is unlikely to reveal much about the object’s meaning within the culture that created it.

This point is made emphatically by Branko Grünbaum—a mathematician who certainly knows his symmetry groups—in a previously published article on ancient Peruvian textiles that is reprinted in Symmetry Comes of Age.

More here.

John Updike reviews Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel in The New Yorker:

Jonathan Safran Foer, born in 1977, came out swinging in 2002, with the publication of his astounding, clownish, tender, intricately and extravagantly plotted novel “Everything Is Illuminated.” From the hilarious overreacher’s English of the Ukrainian tour guide Alexander Perchov to the passionately fanciful evocations of a Polish-Jewish shtetl from 1791 to 1942, the prose kept jolting the reader into the heightened awareness that comes with writing whose exact like hasn’t been seen before. Foer’s second novel, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (Houghton Mifflin; $24.95), continues on a high plane of inventiveness and emotional urgency, while taking place on the solid turf of New York City in the aftermath of that most familiar of recent catastrophes, the 2001 World Trade Center blitz.

More here.

In 1912, a bookseller rummages through trunks full of illuminated medieval manuscripts in a remote Italian castle converted to a Jesuit school. A small volume, not much bigger than a paperback, catches his eye. The bookseller—a Lithuanian immigrant whose past is shaded by run-ins with revolutionaries, anarchists and spies—realizes that the book is clearly older than the rest. It is also full of unusual drawings and is written in cipher.

The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World is the story of that code and the effort to decipher it. It is also the story of Roger Bacon, known as “Doctor Mirabilis”—the miraculous doctor—by his contemporaries, and of his bitterest rival, Thomas Aquinas.

More here.

George Dyson in Edge.org:

Machines that behave unpredictably tend to be viewed as malfunctioning, unless we are playing games of chance. Alan Turing, namesake of the infallible, deterministic, Universal machine, recognized (in agreement with Richard Foreman) that true intelligence depends on being able to make mistakes. “If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent,” he argued in 1947, drawing this conclusion as a direct consequence of Kurt Gödel’s 1931 results.

“The argument from Gödel’s [theorem] rests essentially on the condition that the machine must not make mistakes,” he explained in 1948. “But this is not a requirement for intelligence.” In 1949, while developing the Manchester Mark I for Ferranti Ltd., Turing included a random number generator based on a source of electronic noise, so that the machine could not only compute answers, but occasionally take a wild guess.

More here.  And as usual, Marvin Minsky brutally cuts through the seemingly (at first) profound nonsense:

Mr. Foreman complains that he is being replaced (by “the pressure of information overload”) with “a new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance” because he is connected to “that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I think that this is ridiculous because I don’t see any basic change; there always was too much information. Fifty years ago, if you went into any big library, you would have been overwhelmed by the amounts contained in the books therein. Furthermore, that “touch of a button” has improves things in two ways: (1) it has change the time it takes to find a book from perhaps several minutes into several seconds, and (2) in the past date usually took many minutes, or even hours, to find what you want to find inside that book—but now, a Computer can help you can search through the text, and I see this as nothing but good.

Indeed, it seems to me that only one thing has gone badly wrong. I do not go to libraries any more, because I can find most of what I want by using that wonderful touch of a button! However the copyright laws have gotten worse—and I think that the best thoughts still are in books because, frequently, in those ancient times, the authors developed their ideas for years well for they started to publicly babble. Unfortunately, not much of that stuff from the past fifty years is in the public domain, because of copyrights.

Sean Carrol over at Preposterous Universe writes:

The good news is: the first superconducting magnet has been lowered into the tunnel for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It was a big one, coming in at 15 meters long and 35 metric tons. Now there are only 1,231 identical magnets left to install. The magnets will be used to accelerate protons and antiprotons zipping in opposite directions around a 27-kilometer tunnel, before they collide with an energy of about 14 trillion electron volts. (For comparison purposes, using E=mc², the energy of a proton at rest is about one billion electron volts.)

The bad news comes in the form of the cringe-worthy sound bites that accompany the articles. One tech-blog posting is entitled CERN’s Black Hole Maker LHC on Track, which is a tad misleading. There is a chance, if various optimistic speculations all come out just right, that we might be able to make black holes at the LHC; but it’s an awfully small chance, and you don’t want that to be your standard of success. The BBC refers to the Higgs boson as the God particle, a horrible quip for which we can all blame Leon Lederman. Unlikely as black holes may be, I’m quite certain we won’t be making God at the LHC. Yet another article is entitled New physics tool 27 kilometres long, accompanied by an unmistakably phallic picture. Those crazy Canadians.

One way to think about the Large Hadron Collider is as the largest microscope ever built.

Joseph Brodsky thought that art, especially literature, was a form of “moral insurance”, and had suggested that public policy advocate its wider dissemination.  In his open letter to Havel (reprinted in On Grief and Reason), he called for a democracy of (before?) culture. 

Via Anna Hall, the BBC reports on a new experiment along these lines in Mexico City.  Can reading books help alleviate corruption and indolence in the police force?

Police in Mexico City, one of the most crime-ridden capitals in the world, have been told they must read at least one book a month or forfeit promotion.

The mayor of the district where the scheme is being implemented believes that it will improve their work.

There is a popular conception that Mexican police are corrupt, incompetent and lazy.

Mayor Luis Sanchez believes he can fight low standards in the force by encouraging higher levels of literacy.

Along with guns, bullet-proof vests and handcuffs, police in the district of Nezahualcoyotl will now have to take a book with them.

Adam Kirsch writes in The New Yorker:

Fittingly, for a poet whose reputation was made in ephemeral underground journals, it is on the Internet that the Bukowski cult finds its most florid expression. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to him, not just in America but in Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden, where one fan writes that, after reading him for the first time, “I felt there was a soul-mate in Mr. Bukowski.” Such claims to intimacy are standard among Bukowski’s admirers. On Amazon.com, the reader reviews of his books sound like a cross between love letters and revival-meeting testimonials: “This is the one that speaks to me to the point where each time I read certain pages, I cry”; “This book is one of the most influential books of poetry in my life”; or, most revealing of all, “I hate poetry, but I love Buk’s poems.”

More here.

Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis in Scientific American:

Forty years ago this July, scientists announced the discovery of definitive evidence for the expansion of the universe from a hotter, denser, primordial state. They had found the cool afterglow of the big bang: the cosmic microwave background radiation. Since this discovery, the expansion and cooling of the universe has been the unifying theme of cosmology, much as Darwinian evolution is the unifying theme of biology. Like Darwinian evolution, cosmic expansion provides the context within which simple structures form and develop over time into complex structures. Without evolution and expansion, modern biology and cosmology make little sense.

More here.