‘…this tale of two people’s struggles to escape/fulfill an unknowingly shared fate is at once absurdly fun and highly sentimental. Murakami’s voice — detached but not indifferent, sympathetic but never mawkish — comes through most clearly in that of a supporting character, a young androgyne librarian, who says to Kafka, “A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging.” Perfect.’

From Jon Zobenica’s Atlantic review of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

Highly Sentimental? Not the right words for Murakami’s aesthetic, although when you try to think of another phrase it isn’t easy. But with his emphasis on imperfection, Zobenica is on to something.

He’s Right: The novel is rich and strange and exceedingly wonderful. It shouldn’t work, but it does. The Murakami sensation is one of the most positive signs I’ve seen about the existence of under-served intelligent young American readers.

Justin Mullins in New Scientist:

In the next few months, after being patiently nurtured for 22 years, an artificial brain called Cyc (pronounced “psych”) will be put online for the world to interact with. And it’s only going to get cleverer. Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around the globe as it hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually by anyone who wants to contribute.

Crucially, Cyc’s creator says it has developed a human trait no other AI system has managed to imitate: common sense. “I believe we are heading towards a singularity and we will see it in less than 10 years,” says Doug Lenat of Cycorp, the system’s creator.

More here.  And also see my earlier post about Cyc here.

W. Jay Wood reviews Lust by Simon Blackburn in Christianity Today:

Blackburn is a prolific writer of both popular and professional philosophy, an outstanding essayist, and an insightful reviewer of books, whose sparkling prose customarily displays philosophical skill and evident wit. Lust doesn’t lack in stylistic grace and wit, but its ground note is a smirking satisfaction with its own provocations, and its treatment of opposing views falls well below Blackburn’s usual standard.

At least the reader is forewarned. Blackburn announces at the outset that he has no intention of writing a book about the sin of lust, an intention he admirably fulfills—which may be all to the good, since he appears to lack any developed notion of sin and, even if he has one, he doesn’t think lust qualifies as a sin. He knows quite well, of course, what reputation religious tradition, common sense, and ordinary language have assigned to his subject: “Lust is furtive, ashamed, and embarrassed”; “Lust pursues its own gratification, headlong, impatient of any control, immune to reason”; “Lust looks sideways, inventing deceits and stratagems and seductions, sizing up opportunities”; “Lust subverts propriety” and is “like living shackled to a lunatic.”

More here.

‘The trouble with being a bad boy is that people don’t remember you were once very, very good. In author Truman Ca­pote’s last years, his cringingly public displays of drunkenness and drug use caused old friends to wring their hands over his squandered talent. By his death in 1984, the shambles of his personal life had dwarfed his literary reputation.’

From The Wilson Quarterly’s Periodical Observer, on Brooke Allen’s “Capote Reconsidered,” in The New Criterion.

From the Village Voice:

Literati are increasingly turning to the blogs for discussion, gossip, analysis, and a sense of community. Inevitably, publishers have noticed the power of these informal networks to generate word-of-mouth buzz—the holy grail of marketing—and are looking for ways to harness it. In turn, many bloggerati are on the verge of becoming that contradiction in terms, the professional enthusiast. So what happens now, when these amateurs are faced with the chance to wield influence and become insiders?

More here.

From Newtopia Magazine:

The Shadow, the fictional hero of pulp magazines and classic radios, used to begin every show with the rhetorical question, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Recent reports of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib have had the world asking the same question. According to a United States Army report, the abuses included:

• Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
• Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
• Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
• Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;

More here.

The Cartoons of Mr. Fish: a Selection, which is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org. 

Sanford Schwartz in the New York Review of Books:

For well over half a century, Salvador Dalí has been internationally famous for the sexy and deranged subject matter of his paintings, for his personal nuttiness, flamboyance, and grandiosity, and for the demoralizing way in which he destroyed the borders between creativity and commercial self-promotion. He was a huge character; indeed, he often said, in that simultaneously boastful, cynical, and self-deprecating manner that he perfected, that it was his “personality” that was his greatest achievement. At other times he might announce to the world that his writing was his real achievement, and his painting the “least” of him. Yet what is most solid and substantial about Dalí is very specific and not wildly complex qualities: the particular gleaming surfaces of his paintings, with their often large areas of a single, pulsating color; his feeling for the transient, soft light of dawn or dusk and for the brilliantly hard light of a sunny summer afternoon by the Mediterranean; and his astounding ability to delineate and make us feel the simmering strength in tiny, tightly wound concentrations of lines, dots, or shapes.

More here.

Helen Phillips in New Scientist:

The way patterns of shift work are organised could be causing major health problems, according to a pair of reports commissioned by the UK government body that regulates workplace safety.

The reports, prepared for the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), show that offshore oil workers adopting the most popular shift pattern have a higher risk of heart disease and diabetes. This pattern also makes workers more tired and inattentive, increasing the chance of accidents and mistakes.

More here.

Mary Blume in the International Herald Tribune:

It happens all the time: during an airport delay the man to the left, a Korean perhaps, starts talking to the man opposite, who might be Colombian, and soon they are chatting away in what seems to be English. But the native English speaker sitting between them cannot understand a word.

They don’t know it, but the Korean and the Colombian are speaking Globish, the latest addition to the 6,800 languages that are said to be spoken across the world. Not that its inventor, Jean-Paul Nerrière, considers it a proper language.

More here.

I knew there must be a reason I watch so much TV! Steven Johnson in the New York Times Magazine:

For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ”masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ”24” episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ”24,” you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ”24,” you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be nutritional after all.

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.

More here.

From The London Times:

When the Queen visited India in 1997, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of independence, the Duke of Edinburgh put his foot in it in the customary way. Entering Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, he saw a plaque that stated, “This ground is hallowed with the mingled blood of about 2,000 innocent Hindus, Sikhs, and Mussulmans who were shot by British bullets on 13 April, 1919.” The duke suggested that the figure was an exaggeration. There were protests in Delhi by Sikh organisations and an official banquet was cancelled. Almost as inflammatory as the Amritsar massacre was Dyer’s insistence a few days later that Indians using a street where an Englishwoman had been assaulted would have to crawl down it. The local press saw the order as a racial insult, and Gandhi viewed it as more serious than the massacre itself.

More here.

Bruce Sterling writes in Domus magazine (on-line registration required) about the similiarities of science fiction and design, using an unrealized project for a sci-fi version of stevenson’s novel “Treasure Island”

“Forty years ago, it was unheard of to turn a science fiction movie into a springboard for product design. But it almost happened. And it almost happened in Italy, where famed industrial designer and architect Achille Castiglioni and his brother Pier Giacomo once did the set design for a Space Age science fiction film. The director in question was Renato Castellani, an Italian neorealist and man-about-Milan who had met the Castiglioni brothers at university. For some reason – probably sheer youthful brio – Castellani became obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure classic, Treasure Island.”

From Live Science:

Three new beetles of the genus Agathidium have been named after members of the current administration: A. bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi.

Two former Cornell University entomologists, Quentin Wheeler and Kelly Miller, were in charge of naming 65 new species of slime-mold beetles, which they discovered while studying the insects’ evolution and classification. Wheeler, who is now head of entomology at the Natural History Museum in London, said that the choice to name beetles after President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was out of admiration for their principles, not because they look like the beetles.

More here. (Thanks to Dr. James Rooney).

Alan Boyle in MSNBC:

One scientist came up with a new way of explaining how biology works. A generation later, the other one came up with a new way of explaining how physics works. Today, after a century of scrutiny, both explanations still pretty much hold up. But in popular culture, physicist Albert Einstein is idolized, while biologist Charles Darwin’s legacy is clouded  with controversy.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Tabish Khair admires Siddhartha Deb and Aamer Hussein, two storytellers who combine the cosmopolitan with the provincial in Surface and This Other Salt
The narrator of one of Aamer Hussein’s stories invokes the familiar exilic image of trees and roots. Only he is not talking of rooted trees but of transplanted ones: “A tree removed from its native soil and planted elsewhere puts down new roots, twisted ones, perhaps, but its trunk grows heavy.” This oblique use of a familiar image says a lot about Hussein’s subtle art; it also reveals a link between Hussein and Siddhartha Deb. Their roots might twist through many cultures and histories, but the foliage of their storytelling is remarkably lush – and not just cosmopolitan.

More here.

I wish I could say I was sorry for this cheap shot, but I’m not. Has anybody remarked on the fact that the title of Cardinal Ratzinger’s memoirs, Milestones, is the same as the key work of the “philosopher of Al Qaeda,” Sayyid Qutb? Tariq Ali, eat your heart out while fundamentalisms clash…

Sorry, but I must post this review of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, by Matt Taibbi, for its hilarity. From the New York Press:

(Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse…

You have to read the rest here.  And there’s also this at Crooked Timber.  [Thanks Husain and Robin.]

Sean Carrol at Preposterous Universe:

Alan Boyle has written an enjoyable overview of what Einstein accomplished, and what it means for us today, over at MSNBC. By “enjoyable” I mean “quotes me a lot.” At first I couldn’t remember ever actually being interviewed by Alan, but then I remembered the press conference at the AAAS meeting, which I think is where these nuggets of rich wisdom were mined. (It has been suggested that I use this blog as a forum for puffing myself up. And?)

Another fun article by Alan is on Einstein’s successors, specifically that an increasing number of them are women. Anecdotal evidence and individual stories don’t prove anything, of course, but it’s nice to see talented people overcoming the obstacles that are strewn in their way.

At the risk of compromising my feminist credentials (“pretty sound” — Bitch Ph.D.), I can’t help but note an interesting fact. Namely, that while the percentage of physicists who are female is quite small, the percentage of attractive physicists who are female is very large. That is, the average hotness of female physicists is much (much) higher than that of their male counterparts…

More here.

Contrary to popular belief, the blogosphere is not always a political hotbed of polemical partisanship. A good case in point is the much-yelled-about issue of the anti-Japan protests in China. For all the sound and fury on some Chinese blogs, there is also rational discussion and blogs are providing a meeting ground for common Chinese and Japanese people to speak calmly about the issues. Joi Ito has a very good post on his blog about the protests:

…I do think that the text books and teaching in Japan underplays the actions of the military in China and I believe the Japanese text books are a real problem that should be addressed…

In other words, the Japanese ministry of education needs an overhaul. Maybe they should use Wikipedia instead.

I’m not trying to trivialize the issues that are being protested by the Chinese, but if they are trying to cause change in Japan, maybe some of them can try to talk to their allies in Japan like me instead of trying to force or scare into submission their enemy. A reasonable bridge building effort between activists and experts on both sides to try to address the issues through tactical maneuvers might be useful.

Joi is admirably forthright in admitting Japan’s culpability (something I can relate to, having once apologized to an angry Bangladeshi cabdriver who was upset about the Pakistani army’s mistreatment of Bengalis in 1971), but what is truly remarkable is the discussion which follows in the comments to Joi’s post: there are well over a hundred comments, from all sides of the issue, and many interesting and innovative points are brought up and then debated with conspicuous and thoughtful civility. It is possible to have serious and considerate conversation in the blogosphere. Check it out.

And in a parallel development, I just saw that it was announced about an hour ago that Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi has extended an apology to China:

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi apologized on Friday for Japan’s wartime atrocities and said he would meet Chinese President Hu Jintao in a bid to repair ties that are at their worst in over three decades.

Koizumi, speaking after making the apology in front of world leaders at a multilateral forum, said he would meet Hu on Saturday on the sidelines of the Asia-Africa summit in Jakarta.

“Nothing is produced by antagonism,” Koizumi told traveling reporters. “Friendship is most important. I would like to hold the meeting from that perspective.”

More here in the NY Times.