“Robert P Crease explains why Pythagoras’s theorem is not simply a way of computing hypotenuses, but an emblem of the discovery process itself.”

From Physics Web:

Pythagoras’s theorem is important for its content as well as for its proof. But the fact that lines of specific lengths (3, 4 and 5 units, say) create a right-angled triangle was empirically discovered in different lands long before Pythagoras. Another empirical discovery was the rule for calculating the length of the long side of a right triangle (c) knowing the lengths of the others (a and b), namely c² = a² + b².

Indeed, a Babylonian tablet from about 1800 BC shows that this rule was known in ancient Iraq more than 1000 years before Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century BC. Ancient Indian texts accompanying the Sutras, from between 100 and 500 BC but clearly passing on information of much earlier times, also show a knowledge of this rule. An early Chinese work suggests that scholars there used the calculation at about the same time as Pythagoras, if not before.

But what we do not find in these works are proofs – demonstrations of the general validity of a result based on first principles and without regard for practical application. Proof was itself a concept that had to be discovered. In Euclid’s Elements we find the first attempt to present a more or less complete body of knowledge explicitly via proofs.

More here.

This semester, the NYU administration has “terminated the fellowships” of striking graduate students–in truth, terminated pay, but that would be admitting that they are employees of the university and not apprentices.

In response, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee has set up a Hardship Fund to support strikers, whose srike benefit will fall short of covering expenses, especially in New York City. Specifically, the monies will go towards indispensable expenses such as health care, utilities, and rent for those who have lost their pay.

The strike, as many of you know, centers around the recognition of a graduate student union, in this case GSOC. In its essence, it is a fight over the right of grad students to organize and represent themselves. Cosma Shalizi has perhaps best summed it up: “[U]nions can ask for stupid and/or selfish things, of course — which distinguishes them from any other organization how, exactly? — but the merits of particular proposals isn’t the issue here; punishing people who attempt to organize to exert their rights is.”

If you support that right, I urge you to donate to the Hardship Fund if you can.

(For those of you who don’t know or know little about the strike, these three earlier dispatches by Asad, who is on strike, lay out the background and the issues at stake.)

Patrick Caulfield’s main subject as a painter was the blissful, occasionally transcending melancholy of human absence and solitude. The bars and restaurants and other social spaces he painted were famously devoid of people. The “exit” sign that is the focus of one of his later paintings called Happy Hour is the direction in which his fellow-drinkers have all already headed. The figure reflected in the single filled glass at the centre of the canvas is the painter pursuing his solitary practice. . . .

Caulfield, who died last year and would have been 70 this month, was an urbanite, with no taste for the pastoral in art or in life, or for the trappings of country living. When he was invited to choose from works in the National Gallery for the Artist’s Eye series in 1986, he ruled out religious pictures (“I didn’t want paintings of angels”) and concentrated on paintings that reflected his interest in urban imagery. Half his selection was drawn from the gallery’s basement, the repository of paintings that are, on the whole, considered less remarkable than the ones in the grand rooms. The still lifes of drink and food, and scenes set in music halls and taverns, tended to be equally modest. Lunch-time, the painting of his own that Caulfield chose to include, was typical of his sense of humour in that there’s no food to be found in it. It shows the nicotined corner of a city pub decorated with a pot of geraniums and generic bric-a-brac, and crowded with deep, all-too-solid shadows.

More from The Guardian Unlimited here.

From Scientific American:

My foray into American history started when James C. Rees, executive director of Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate, asked me whether I could re-create the way Washington, who was born in 1732 and died in 1799, had looked at three important points in his life. Rees wanted these life-size figures for Mount Vernon’s new education center, which will open in the fall of 2006. The 19-year-old Washington would be depicted in 1751, during his early career as an adventurer and surveyor. The 45-year-old would be shown in 1777, when he and his troops were bivouacked during the dreadful winter at Valley Forge, waiting for a chance to attack the British, who had occupied the city of Philadelphia. These two figures would complement a third portrayal, the 57-year-old Washington being sworn in on April 30, 1789, as the first president, a role he chose instead of the alternative he had been offered: becoming king.

My work as a forensic anthropologist for the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, coroner’s office has augmented this experience. But nothing prepared me for the curious challenges involved in figuring out what Washington actually looked like.

More here.

From Nature:

If love is blind, then maybe humour is the attention-grabber. That’s the conclusion of two recent studies that confirm a long-standing stereotype of flirting: that women like joky men, while men like women who laugh at their jokes. Eric Bressler of Westfield State College, Massachusetts, and colleague Sigal Balshine of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, asked more than 200 male and female college students to examine photos of members of the opposite sex. Some had funny quotes pinned beneath them, such as: “My high school was so rough we had our own coroner.” Others had bland ones: “I’d rather walk to school than take the bus.”

Women ranked the humorous men as better potential partners, the researchers found – and as more friendly, fun and popular. Men’s view of a woman, on the other hand, appeared to be uninfluenced by her wit. Bressler suspected that men and women do, in fact, both value a sense of humour in a mate, but that they might be looking for slightly different things: women valuing an ability to be funny and men valuing an ability to see the joke.

More here.

Sughra Raza. “She just couldn’t decide about the hallway tile …”. 2004

Digital collage based on a mammogram.

Timothy Lehmann reviews Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought by Jerry Weinberger, in the Weekly Standard:

To some, Benjamin Franklin is known as a skillful diplomat and intrepid scientist, one of America’s most important and influential Founders. Yet Franklin is also known as something of a didactic boor, droning on about self-denial, discipline, and “virtue.” D.H. Lawrence saw in him the personification of Nietzsche’s last man, while Max Weber saw in Franklin the archetype of the Protestant ethic at work in America–bland, bourgeois, and eminently prosaic.

There is something–a little something–to these claims, according to Jerry Weinberger, who teaches political science at Michigan State. Yet Weinberger’s Benjamin Franklin Unmasked offers a revolutionary reevaluation of Franklin’s thought, one that unveils Franklin as a far more subtle, complex, and subversive thinker than most have cared to notice.

There has been a spate of biographies reviving interest in the Founders recently, but this is not a biography. Rather, it is an attempt, through a close reading primarily of Franklin’s Autobiography, to plumb the depths of Franklin’s mind and figure out just what he thought about the big questions. And contrary to Franklin’s reputation as a humorless stiff, Weinberger reveals him to be a surprising and impressive thinker–a kind of American Socrates who mercilessly refuted his philosophical interlocutors, and whose profound philosophical probity was laced with ironic skepticism.

More here.

Kelly Young in New Scientist:

In January 2005, the US Space Surveillance Network saw a 31-year-old US Thor rocket body collide in space with part of the third stage of the Chinese CZ-4 rocket that exploded in March 2000. At least three pieces broke off the Thor rocket stage, adding to the growing collection of space junk orbiting Earth.

Now, NASA researchers have calculated that such occurrences will only increase. Even without launching any additional spacecraft, the number of new fragments created by collisions will exceed the number falling back to Earth and burning up by 2055.

And reaching that tipping point by 2055 is a best case scenario…

This is of concern to space-faring countries because even a centimetre-sized speck of debris, speeding along at thousands of kilometres per hour, could damage an operational satellite.

More here.

Sheelah Kolhatkar in the NY Observer:

While Mr. Zakaria is very focused on broadening his media platform—expanding his “reach,” as he likes to call it—he is also busy navigating the social one, the dinners, speeches and charity events through which he cultivates powerful mentors and allies. His patrons include former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who invites him over for eclectic dinner parties, and Pete Peterson, the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose journal Foreign Affairs provided Mr. Zakaria with his first publishing job.

“I look up to people who really make you think seriously about the big issues that are going on, that confront the world, either historically or today,” said Mr. Zakaria. “What I like are ‘idea’ books and ‘idea’ people.”

His affinity for such people revealed itself early on. As an undergraduate at Yale, where he took hold of the college’s political union, he brought in outside speakers such as William Buckley, George McGovern, Bob Shrum and Caspar Weinberger for debates and discussions with students. They would often leave as future Friends of Fareed.

From the Wikipedia:

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case establishing that most laws against abortion violate a constitutional right to privacy, overturning all state laws outlawing or restricting abortion. It is one of the most controversial decisions in Supreme Court history.

The decision in Roe v. Wade prompted a decades-long national debate over whether terminating pregnancies should be legal; the role of the Supreme Court in constitutional adjudication; and the role of religious views in the political sphere. Roe v. Wade became one of the most politically significant Supreme Court decisions in history, reshaping national politics, dividing the nation into “pro-choice” and “pro-life” camps, and inspiring grassroots activism.

Opposition to Roe comes primarily from those who viewed the Court’s decision as illegitimate for straying too far from the text and history of the Constitution, and those possessing beliefs about the inviolability of fetal human life.

Support for Roe comes from those who view the decision as necessary to preserve women’s equality and personal freedom, and those who believe in the primacy of individual over collective rights.

Contents

• 1 Background of the case
• 2 The Supreme Court’s decision
  • 2.1 Abortion
  • 2.2 Justiciability
• 3 Dissenting Opinions
• 4 Controversy over Roe
  • 4.1 ‘Arbitrary’ and ‘Legislative’
• 5 Roe’s role in subsequent decisions and politics
• 6 “Jane Roe” switches sides
• 7 References
  • 7.1 Scholarly Secondary Sources
  • 7.2 Primary Sources
• 8 TV movie
• 9 External links

More here.  More in today’s news here, here, and here.

“Maps for Lost Lovers” by Nadeem Aslam reviewed in The New York Times by Akash Kapur:

FROM Adam on, exile has been man’s (and God’s) cruelest punishment. ”An exile’s life is no life,” lamented Leonidas, the ancient Greek poet. Dante, banished from Florence, described the pain in more concrete terms. ”You will leave everything you love most,” he warns in ”The Divine Comedy.” ”You will know how salty / another’s bread tastes.” Indeed, although it’s in the English Midlands, the town in Aslam’s novel can resemble a transplanted Pakistani village, its language and customs and religion more or less intact. It is a place where ancestral feuds and gossip are carried over from the homeland, where the diktats of clerics supersede English common law and arranged marriages are the norm.

For Kaukab, as for the multitude of other characters in this intricately populated novel, the alienation of exile is felt as a longing not so much for the homeland as for a simpler, more general sense of human connection. Even within their cultural cocoon, the inhabitants of Dasht-e-Tanhaii are hopelessly estranged — husbands from wives, parents from children. Neighbors, quick to seize on the smallest transgressions of tradition, malign one another with cruel innuendo. While Aslam will inevitably be compared to Monica Ali and Hanif Kureishi, two other authors who have chronicled the lives of South Asian Muslims in England, the psychological and emotional core of his novel is closer to that of Golding’s ”Lord of the Flies.” In both novels, a tight-knit community is marooned in a distant corner of the world, caught in a spiral of violence and vindictiveness.

In an interview with a British newspaper, Aslam said that ”Maps for Lost Lovers” is, in part, a response to the events of Sept. 11, and that he was inspired to ”condemn the small-scale Sept. 11’s that go on every day.” Aslam’s real talent is on display when he ventures into his characters’ minds, showing the nuances of their struggles to hold onto God and describing their battles to escape what Joseph Conrad called ”the exile of utter unbelief.”

More here.

Towards the end of his short, unruly life, Martin Kippenberger made a print called Matisse’s Studio Sublet to Spider-Man. In it, the great French painter is pointing with a long stick at a detail of one of his big drawings, while the action hero encircles him in a variety of dramatic poses as if fighting the very idea of art itself.

For Spider-Man, read Kippenberger, a kind of self-styled art anti-hero, whose life represented a similar battle of wills with the art establishment, whom he constantly provoked and often offended. With hindsight, though, the Joker might have been a more apt alter ego for a man who attempted to turn his life itself into an ongoing work of art.

more from The Observer here.

From The New York Times:

Scientists are not typically disposed to wielding a word like “personality” when talking about animals. Doing so borders on the scientific heresy of anthropomorphism. And yet for a growing number of researchers from a broad range of disciplines – psychology, evolutionary biology and ecology, animal behavior and welfare – it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid that term when trying to describe the variety of behaviors that they are now observing in an equally broad and expanding array of creatures, everything from nonhuman primates to hyenas and numerous species of birds to water striders and stickleback fish and, of course, giant Pacific octopuses.

Through close and repeated observations of different species in a variety of group settings and circumstances, scientists are finding that our own behavioral traits exist in varying degrees and dimensions among creatures across all the branches of life’s tree. Observing our fellow humans, we all recognize the daredevil versus the more cautious, risk-averse type; the aggressive bully as opposed to the meek victim; the sensitive, reactive individual versus the more straight-ahead, proactive sort, fairly oblivious to the various subtle signals of his surroundings. We wouldn’t have expected to meet all of them, however, in everything from farm animals and birds to fish and insects and spiders. But more and more now, we are recognizing ourselves and our ways to be recapitulations of the rest of biology. And as scientists track these phenomena, they are also beginning to unravel such core mysteries as the bioevolutionary underpinnings of personality, both animal and human; the dynamic interplay between genes and environment in the expression of various personality traits; and why it is that nature invented such a thing as personality in the first place.

More here.

Pierogi’s wall-bound, department store–esque presentation of Brian and Leon Dewan’s “hand-crafted semiautomatic musical instruments” is without doubt the early favorite for the Best Interactive Show of 2006. Merging the homemade synth tones of NYC’s late-’60s techno-hippies The Silver Apples with a double shot of Sun Ra’s reverent otherworldliness, the cousins have created seventeen effusive sculpture-instruments, most of which look like the offspring of a grandfather clock and a robot. Given titles like The Administrator, 2005, or Speaker of the House, 2005, these devices (many made from handsome birch wood) and their forest of switches and knobs project both hypnotizing astral soundscapes and an authority reminiscent of the dictatorial computer from Godard’s Alphaville.

from Artforum.

Garry Wills reviews Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis by Jimmy Carter, in the New York Review of Books:

Carter rightly says in Our Endangered Values that the norms of religion and politics are different. His religion, at any rate, places its greatest priority on love, of God and one’s neighbor, even to the point of self-sacrifice. But a president cannot make his nation sacrifice itself—that would be dereliction of duty. The priority of politics is justice, and love goes beyond that. But love can help one find out what is just, without equating the two. That is why none of us, even those who believe in the separation of church and state, professes a separation of morality and politics. Insofar as believers—the great majority of Americans—derive many if not most of their moral insights from their beliefs, they must mingle religion and politics, again without equating the two.

In his new book, Carter addresses religion and politics together in a way that he has not done before, because he thinks that some Americans, and especially his fellow Baptists, have equated the two in a way that contradicts traditional Baptist beliefs in the autonomy of local churches, in the opposition to domination by religious leaders, and in the fellowship of love without reliance on compulsion, political or otherwise.

More here.

Anthony Mitchell in The Guardian:

Ethiopia’s version of Pop Idol is a far cry from the glamour and glitz of its British and US inspirations.

Faded satin sheets and signs taped to the walls provide the backdrop. Frequent power cuts, feedback from poor sound equipment and the ringing of mobile phones compete with the singers. But despite the makeshift set, hastily constructed each week in a shabby hotel, Ethiopian Idols has fast won the highest ratings on otherwise dull state-run TV, and broken new ground.

The show even has it own Simon Cowell, the bad-guy judge on the British and US versions. The catchphrase of musician Feleke Hailu -“alta fakedem” or “you didn’t make it” in Amharic – may seem positively meek compared to Cowell’s acerbic reviews. But saxophonist Feleke, 46, has caused a sensation in this tradition-bound culture.

“Most of the time I tell [contestants] to go back to their old jobs, forget about a career in singing,” he said. “Or I tell them they sing like donkeys. Sometimes they get angry. The girls burst into tears, and a few weeks ago one singer threw a stick at me after I told him he had failed to get through to the next round.

More here.

David Pogue in the New York Times (via One Good Move):

RULES FOR TROLLS AND PILLS…

1. Use the strongest language possible. Calling names is always effective, and four-letter words show that you mean business.

2. Having a violent opinion of something doesn’t require you to actually try it yourself. After all, plenty of people heatedly object to books they haven’t read or movies they haven’t seen. Heck, you can imagine perfectly well if something is any good.

3. If it’s a positive review that you didn’t like, call the reviewer a “fanboy.” Do not entertain the notion that the product, service, show, movie, book or restaurant might, in fact, be good. Instead, assume that the reviewer has received payment from the reviewee. Work in the word “shill” if possible.

More here.

India Knight reviews Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy, in The Times of London:

Female society seems to be divided into women who find the pornification of their universe (Hollywood waxes, plastic breasts, group sex, lap-dancing classes at the community centre) cause for enthusiastic celebration — so post-feminist and empowering, don’t you know — and those who look on, bewildered, creeped-out and really quite alarmed by the pert new tits-out, legs-apart world they find themselves living in.

Many of that first group call themselves new feminists and feel they are evolved and modern, a hip young army breaking boundaries and redefining what it means to be female, particularly as regards sex. The other group have some difficulty processing the notion that their mothers’ generation marched, made noise and burnt their bras so that, 30 years down the line, some of their educated, politically informed daughters could attend exclusive parties where they might put on a display of girl-on-girl action in front of baying strangers, or hop onto a stage and pretend to hump the floor. For a laugh. That would be after the strip club, but before the threesome, which isn’t about threesomes per se, but more about celebrating being young, sexy and hot. And being a girl who can think about sex like a man. Woohoo!

Ariel Levy, a young writer for New York magazine, falls into the bewildered category.

More here.

Arthur C. Danto in The Nation:

Masaccio discovered how convincingly to make a two-dimensional figure on a flat plane look like a three-dimensional object in real space. Fra Angelico discovered how convincingly to create the illusion of a living figure whose exterior features express an inner spiritual state–the look of love, a state of devotion or one of anguish.

Contrasting the two artists in his great work on aesthetics, Hegel praised Fra Angelico for his invention of what the philosopher called “interiority”–“the investigation of inner coordination, the indwelling meaning of facial expressions.” Fra Angelico’s work is infused, Hegel writes, “with the fervor of a religious love remote from the world, with a conventual purity of disposition, elevation, and sanctity of soul.” He was not called Fra Angelico for nothing. But who would expect an exhibition of works by so pure a spirit, so naïve a faith, so innocent a vision to be the hottest show of the season? No one would say that the remarkable exhibition of Fra Angelico at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through January 29) is likely to be the school for contemporary New York artists. But it is the show to which artists tell me they keep going back.

More here.

“In this exclusive extract from his forthcoming memoirs, Kurt Vonnegut is horrified by the hypocrisy in contemporary US politics.”

From The Guardian:

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen the first world war. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the first world war so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?

More here.