Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books:

The press in Continental Europe has gone about insulting Muslims, and defending its right to do so, with a zeal which ought to alert us to the fact that this is an ‘all-faith’ conflict, with staunch believers in either corner: ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ are more the trappings of the fighters’ retinue. The solemn talk about democratic values, the dire imprecations of the ultra-godly, the pious tantrums: these are among the reasons neither opponent can quite pick the other out, let alone the end of his own arm. From time to time it must be tempting to take a wild swing. Torching a legation in the Middle East is one possibility. Another is to flail around with such commendable gusto as to propel oneself over the ropes and into the crowd, leaving the adversary untouched. In a recent opinion piece for Le Figaro, Renaud Girard, a senior foreign correspondent, gave a spirited show of how this is best achieved, on an off day, by an intelligent heavyweight (‘grand reporteur au service étranger’). ‘If the 5000 Muslims who demonstrated in Brussels are so horrified by the Western values of freedom and secularism,’ he declared . . . the rest is easy to guess.

Not every advocate of the right to break a religious taboo believes that European Muslims who find it upsetting should pack up their grievances and head for Saudi Arabia – Girard’s destination of choice. There are more serious points to make.

More here.

“South Pacific villagers worship a mysterious American they call John Frum – believing he’ll one day shower their remote island with riches.”

Paul Raffaele in Smithsonian Magazine:

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Last night I drove into New Haven, Connecticut, to catch an advanced screening of Flock of Dodos, a movie about evolution and intelligent design. Afterwards I took part in a panel discussion. It was an interesting evening, not only because the movie was quite good, but because it provoked a noisy discussion.

I don’t want to give away too much of Flock of Dodos, because I would prefer that a lot of people get a chance to see it for themselves. Randy Olson, the creator of the film, spoke after the film and explained that the version we saw was still a bit rough around the edges, and he’s getting ready to enter it into various film festivals and hopes to get distribution after that. I wish him well.

To be brief, then, Olson is a biologist-turned-filmmaker who got a bit baffled by the rise of intelligent design and decided to investigate, heading back to his native state of Kansas. He talked to school board members, intelligent design advocates, and evolutionary biologists. Olson’s a friendly, open guy who can share a beer with a creationist without getting it splashed in his face. But in all the laid-back conversation, he offers some pretty penetrating observations of the intelligent design movement. A creationist board of education member winks and smiles with a mix of flirtation and cynicism. An intelligent design advocate declares that all biology textbooks promote the lies of Haeckel about embryos and evolution, only to start paging through the textbooks in his office in a futile search to find any mention of Haeckel. A cardiologist who is one of the leading champions of intelligent design in Kansas doesn’t even know which scientific meetings he would go to present his research, if he had any research to present.

More here.

From UNSW:

Violinist and industrial designer Tricia Ho is drawing plaudits for her ergonomically designed violin that takes the pain out of playing the bowed string instrument.

Ms Ho, who has just completed a Bachelor of Industrial Design at the University of New South Wales, designed her idea of the “perfect electric violin” using high-tech materials for her final year design project.

Dubbed “EV” (for ergonomic violin), the prototypic instrument is to receive a German design award and is short-listed for this year’s Australian Design Awards, to be announced in May.

Made from a combination of carbon fibre and a high-tech “shape memory polymer”, Ms Ho designed EV so that it could be literally moulded to suit a player’s personality and physique. The instrument’s rigid carbon fibre body couples to a range of flexible polymer frames. These interchangeable frames include a self-supporting option so that a player doesn’t need to grip the instrument under the chin while playing.

More here.

There’s something appealingly odd about Harri Kallio’s color photographs of dodos in their lush natural habitat, beginning with the fact that they depict a species that went extinct about 150 years before photography was invented. Kallio, a Finnish artist whose previous work includes photographic portraits of moths, first started thinking about the dodo when he reread Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and noticed John Tenniel’s famous drawings of the brawny bird with its tiny wings and enormous hooked beak. “I couldn’t help but laugh,” Kallio recalls in the introduction to his own book, The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters. “Somehow it was hard to believe that once upon a time there really had been something like the Dodo out there in the world.”

more from Slate here.

In July of 2004, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a rock trio from New York City, opened for Devo, the new-wave group, in a show at the band shell in Central Park. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ 2003 début album, “Fever to Tell,” had gone gold, a considerable achievement for a noisy and idiosyncratic band that lacks a bass player and has a sound that is sometimes thin and spiky. The group had sold half a million records, in part because the video for “Maps,” a stirring love song that is as close as the band gets to a ballad, had become a staple on MTV2. . . In the chorus of “Cheated Hearts,” a gorgeous, yearning track that could become the album’s big hit, Karen O sings one phrase over and over in a crescendo: “I think that I’m bigger than the sound.” The band responds with a convincing eruption of noise, elegantly belying her claim. The moment neatly captures Karen O’s appeal: in her recordings and in her live performances, she satisfies the audience’s need for a star while allowing us to see the ordinary person struggling with that role. “It’s important for kids to feel bigger than they usually do,” Karen O told me. “We’re trying to make you feel a little bit cooler than you might actually be.” Kids listening to “Show Your Bones” will recognize the insecurity she describes, and feel it drain away.

more from Jones at the New Yorker here.

LONDON – 1944

How do I capture a city and a time? It began in the back of a camouflaged RAF lorry that smelled of oil. I clung to the side as the driver swung the lorry fast around the curved Cotswold road from Bourton-on-the-Water to the railway station. All I had left of the uniform I had worn for ten months as an aircraft woman second class in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force of the RAF was the pair of issue shoes, heavy black masculine clodhoppers. I carried the suitcase I had kept hidden full of civilian clothes to wear on leave, a civilian ration book, some clothing coupons, and my discharge papers (my ticket). I was dressed in the suit I had worn to go into the WAAF at the recruiting station in Kingsway. That was the beginning of the time in London, and it ended, 18 months later, not in London, but at a dinner party in New York the evening after I came home from the war.

Why, after all this time, do I need to recall this? There is an old man, dreaming of Piccadilly in 1944, when he was young and drunk and a bomber pilot. A friend who brought back a hidden wound of one forever relived day has shot himself nearly 40 years later. I know that they, in their way, and I in mine, have no hope of ever being civilians completely.

more from Virginia Quarterly Review here.

any museum, really . . . subscribe[s] to an identical hushed-bank-vault authoritarianism that practically screams out for a more humanly scaled sensory corrective. And though contemporary-art museums occasionally break down and incorporate some audio artist’s work into their programming, or someone at a museum of cultural anthropology will set a low-volume loop of powwow songs running behind a tepee diorama, it rarely results in the kind of subjective experiential transformation you get from, say, looking at a roomful of Pollocks to the tune of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

And then along comes the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum’s attempt to harness this very niche of personal-reality modification using rentable infrared-sensitive headsets. Part of what makes “Sonic Scenery” so remarkable is its total unlikeliness. It isn’t that it’s such a radical idea — Morton Feldman’s 1971 Rothko Chapel is probably the most famous in a lineage of synesthetic art-making with roots dating back at least as far as Wagner and the multimedia extravaganzas of Diaghilev. In recent years, local interdisciplinary virtuoso Steve Roden composed site-specific soundtracks for, among other locales, Rudolph Schindler’s King’s Road House. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum commissioned soundtracks from a dozen or so contemporary musicians and artists for its 2004 exhibit “Shhh!” But the success of “Sonic Scenery” lies in the improbable fusing of unapologetic dorkiness and unimpeachable hippitude.

more from Doug Harvey at The LA Weekly here.

From Scientific American:

An international team of astronomers has discovered a new class of stars–massively compressed old neutron stars that seem inactive but for intermittent bursts of radio waves. Dubbing them rotating radio transients (RRATs), the researchers note that their isolated outbursts last for as few as two milliseconds and are separated by gaps as long as three hours.

“These things were very difficult to pin down,” says Dick Manchester of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Australia Telescope National Facility. “For each object we’ve been detecting radio emissions for less than one second a day. And because these are single bursts, we’ve had to take great care to distinguish them from terrestrial radio interference.” Given the fact that the single, 35-minute observation that first revealed these new stars had only a roughly 20 percent chance of catching one of these outbursts, there may be as many as five times more of these RRATs than the 100,000 or so constant pulsars in the Milky Way.

More here.

From Nature:

Next month, biologist Erik Born will be wielding a crossbow and firing satellite tags into the hides of walruses, having manoeuvred his rubber dinghy through the pack ice off western Greenland. By tagging the walruses, Born will be able to track the animals’ movements and behaviour from afar over several years. He will keep an eye on them using the same free Internet tool that has opened the eyes of millions to the possibilities of digital geography (and the sight of their house from above) — the Google Earth virtual globe. When the walruses migrate in the spring, Born and anyone else with a copy of the Google Earth software and a decent Internet connection, will be able to follow their westerly path to Baffin Island or the Canadian coast, and their return.

To the casual user, of which it has attracted millions since its launch last June, the appeal of Google Earth is the ease with which you can zoom from space right down to street level, with images that in some places are sharp enough to show individual people. Its popularity with a growing number of scientists lies in the almost-equal ease with which it lets them lay data with a spatial component on top of background imagery — a trick they can repeat with multiple data sets. By offering researchers an easy way into GIS software, Google Earth and other virtual globes are set to go beyond representing the world, and start changing it.

More here.

Tony Rothman in American Scientist:

The central fixture of Einstein lore is that the lowly patent clerk conjured from pure thought not only his theories but also the questions they answered. Not quite: Einstein himself helped foster this myth (more through carelessness than design, one suspects) by being less than fastidious about providing references in his papers, and since then credulous scientists have equated absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Physicists are notorious for taking history on faith, but none is required to prove this point—the evidence is in plain sight if one cares to look. The papers of Einstein and his contemporaries, as well as Einstein’s letters, are published. Anyone who reads them quickly realizes that Einstein had a very good sense of the currents of science swirling about him and once or twice relied on the insights of colleagues.

More here.

One of the blogs that we at 3QD like very much, in terms of both its form and content, is A Fistful of Euros. We have made it into the top ten finalists in their “Best Non-European Weblog” category of annual web awards. It would certainly be nice to win, and might even get us some desperately needed attention. If, and only if, you think we deserve it, please click here, scroll down to the “Best Non-European Weblog” category and vote for us. Or vote for whomever else you think is most deserving there.

Thanks!

Alan Boyle at MSNBC:

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh devised 40 pickup lines, drawn from film, TV, books of one-liners and other sources. All of the scenarios involved a male “chatting up” a female. Some of them took a humorous, even risque approach. Others were compliments (for example, “Your eyes are blue, like the ocean. And baby, I’m lost at sea”). Still others capitalized on the picker-upper’s familiarity with culture, or highlighted his character or wealth. Even the direct “wanna have sex” approach was included. (You can see the whole list here.) …

For the most part, the sappy compliments and the risque humor fell dead-flat. “Wanna have sex?” ranked 30th on the list of 40.

In contrast, the top-rated pickup lines weren’t “lines” at all, but scenarios in which a man lent aid to a woman at a bus stop, or sought her advice in buying a watch, or commented on a painting at an art gallery.

“As anticipated, opening gambits which revealed wealth, and those demonstrating personal qualities such as generosity, the ability to take charge, and physical fitness, were judged likely to appeal to women,” the researchers wrote. “In line with the mating mind hypothesis, gambits displaying a cultured background or artistic talent were also judged likely to be effective.”

So what’s the perfect pickup line? Based on this research, a woman colleague here at MSNBC.com suggested: “Running the marathon made me too distracted to manage my hedge fund today, but can I help you with your coat?”

More here.

Dear Carly,

Nice song. Wow, you really stuck it to me, eh? Yes, ma’am.

Jesus, you are one bitter woman, Carly Simon.

Listen, I’m pretty busy right now with high-profile meetings and social engagements, but there were things I simply could not let stand.

First of all, that party took place on a yacht. So the way I walked in was perfectly appropriate. In fact, there is a certain way that one is expected to conduct oneself in such a situation. I could explain but I doubt you’re interested. As for the apricot scarf and the tilted hat, again, perfectly appropriate for a maritime soiree. Look it up. I’m sorry you had a problem with that. Funny, there were plenty of girls that night who certainly had no quarrel.

Secondly, yes, I went up to Saratoga for an important horserace. And yes, my horse won, thanks to years of training and the hard work of all the people involved. Is this a bad thing? And yes, I did take the jet to Nova Scotia. I would do it again in an instant. Have you ever seen the total eclipse of the sun, Carly? It’s one of the most amazing natural phenomena one could witness, so, if I have the means to see it, I don’t see that as vanity, I see it as being fully alive. I also took 35 orphans up there with me, free of charge, but there’s nothing about that in your song. All right, I didn’t really do that. But I thought about it and that’s what matters.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Another and altogether different approach to media critique is manifest in Poslednji dani Deda Mraza (The Last Days of Santa Claus), 2001, an impressive painting by Biljana Đurđević. The corpse of a paunchy middle-aged man is laid out on a wooden table in an old-fashioned morgue, his figure foreshortened and stretching diagonally across the picture plane. His red coat, trimmed with white fur, has fallen open to reveal a grayish undershirt and briefs. He sports fashionable sunglasses, as if transported to his resting place straight from a nearby shopping mall. The young, Belgrade-based Đurđević, one of the few artists in “On Normality” who is widely known outside of Serbia, has invested little empathy in her rendering of this corpse. Rather, Đurđević’s baroque, necrophiliac realism comes across as a scrupulously unflinching, unforgiving, and perhaps even vengeful study in disillusionment. It doesn’t take much of a leap to read this postmortem as a response to a society that counts graphic images of dead bodies among its infotainment staples, sustaining itself through a politics of fear practiced by both ideologues and organized crime bosses.

more from Artforum here.

From The Guardian:

Love is blossoming in the British Library – and not just in the secluded corners of Humanities 2. Crouching beneath a walkway on the far wall of the foyer, a small selection of books, manuscripts, sketches and other memorabilia charts the life of Britain’s favourite love poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. After all, unless you’ve delivered a hand-crafted valentine with specially written love poem, unveiled a surprise sequence of sonnets charting the growth of your devotion and arranged an escape from the “vile slavery” your paramour suffers under in their parental abode, well … does it really count?

The love story between Elizabeth and Robert is charming enough to melt the heart of the most determined cynic. They first met in 1845 after exchanging compliments on each other’s poetry, then began corresponding – despite her father’s disapproval – before marrying and eloping to Italy in 1846, where, naturally, they lived happily ever after.

The bond I undertake to seek
exchanges comforts
found from understanding
and being understood
although
when I gaze upon your form
I see emotion as a mirage

you, the one love
who will never truly stand before me.

Your flesh can be only touched
in dreams
when reality comes alive
in epic tales, played out nightly
or in that half snooze state
I sometimes get to fool around in

A world where my desire
for you can be indulged.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Forget about opposites attracting. We like people who look like us, because they tend to have personalities similar to our own. And, a new study suggests, the longer we are with someone, the more similarities in appearance grow. Researchers set out to investigate why couples often tend to resemble one another. They asked 11 male and 11 female participants to judge the age, attractiveness and personality traits of 160 real-life married couples. Photographs of husbands and wives were viewed separately, so the participants didn’t know who was married to whom.

The test participants rated men and woman who were actual couples as looking alike and having similar personalities. Also, the longer the couples had been together, the greater the perceived similarities. The researchers speculate that the sharing of experiences might affect how couples look.

“Testosterone is linked to masculine face shapes and it also affects behavior,” Little told LiveScience. “Also, the face displays our emotions and over time emotional expressions may become written in the face.” For example, someone who smiles a lot may develop lines and muscles that are suggestive of someone who is happy.

More here:

Charles Rosen reviews The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin, in the New York Review of Books:

A history of Western music is, more or less, a history of all the music that has a history—that is, a large body of musical works that stretch from a distant past to the present through a series of stylistic revolutions. Other civilizations, India in particular, have magnificent musical traditions, but few authentic, documented musical works survive from their past. Only in the West was there an elaborate system of notation that delivered the musical artifacts of more than a millennium to the future, and, as a consequence, only in the West has there been an extravagant historical development from the Gregorian chant of the tenth century to the symphonic complexities of Wagner and Stravinsky, and the contested triumphs of modernism. Western music, in short, has a history that can be placed in richness and complexity by the side of a history of literature and a history of the visual arts.

More here.

Helen Pearson in Nature:

Idlers, loafers and layabouts, listen up. A new study suggests that the times when we sit around twiddling our thumbs could in fact be vital for learning.

The idea stems from experiments in which neuroscientists eavesdropped on the brains of rats as they explored their environments. They found that the rats’ brains ‘replay’ their experiences in reverse when the animals pause briefly to rest.

The scientists, David Foster and Matthew Wilson working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, inserted a pincushion of fine wires into the animals’ skulls. These allowed the team to simultaneously monitor the electrical activity of around 100 individual brain cells in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory.

The researchers placed each wired-up rat in a straight 1.5-metre run. They recorded brain-cell activity as the rats scurried up and down, pausing at each end to eat, groom and scratch their whiskers.

As the rats ran along the track, the nerve cells fired in a very specific sequence. This is not surprising, because certain cells in this region are known to be triggered when an animal passes through a particular spot in a space.

But the researchers were taken aback by what they saw when the rats were resting. Then, the same brain cells replayed the sequence of electrical firing over and over, but in reverse and speeded up.

More here.

Terry Teachout in Commentary:

The Beatles released Let It Be, the last of their thirteen albums, 36 years ago. Today there is no one musical group or soloist capable of commanding the attention paid to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr between 1964, when they first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and 1970, when McCartney announced that the group was disbanding. Just as there is no longer a common culture, so there is no longer a common style of music to which most English-speaking people listen. Yet the Beatles and their music continue to fascinate successive generations of music lovers, so much so that more than two dozen books have been published about them, the latest of which is a thousand-page biography by the journalist Bob Spitz.

Written in a straightforwardly journalistic style, The Beatles: The Biography provides an exhaustive and generally reliable account of the bandmembers’ lives and careers up to 1970, and is of no small value as a study in what might be called the sociology of celebrity. But like most pop-music biographies, it has little of interest to say about the Beatles’ work; anyone in search of a thoughtful critical appraisal will find it unhelpful.

Such an appraisal must begin by taking into account the fact that the Beatles were the first rock-and-roll musicians to be written about as musicians.

More here.