Hilton Kramer in the New York Observer:

I was glad to see that The New York Times featured its obituary of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) on the front page. After all, no other photographer of his time lived and worked so long or commanded the admiration of so many artists, critics, editors, museum curators and connoisseurs of photography—not to mention the public at large—and none bore worldwide fame with a more appealing combination of intelligence, authority, insouciance and self-deprecating irony. In high spirits, Henri (as I shall speak of him here) was as amusing as his most amusing pictures, and he was certainly a master of comedy in many of his photographs. Yet what was deepest about both the man and his work was the gravity of his moral candor.

More here.

Some of us have this odd fascination with El Bulli, the over-the-top experimental restuarant in Roses, Spain. Sara Dickerman, one of the smartest food (as cultural anthropology) writers I know, had an insightful take on El Bulli and the new haute cuisine some time ago. It’s still worth a read.

“The form of [El Bulli Chef Ferran] Adrià’s food, for example, echoes that of mass-market snacks. His liquid-filled ravioli are reminiscent of the liquid center of the ’80s phenomenon, Freshen Up gum; the mushroom-gelee “slurps” resemble the suckable packets of yogurt sold in grocery stores today, and his phyllo “pizza” snack, coated in tomato powder and parmesan, seems a step away from a Dorito.”

The Poverty Action Lab has deployed a new method of evaluating policies designed to reduce poverty and improve education, among others–learning the lesson from the natural sciences, the PAL uses randomized trials. The results are often fascinating, well if you’re the policy type anyway.

Some of their findings:

Deworming (e.g., of hookworms, round worms and similar parasites which infect more than 25% of the world) is a cheap way of improving education attendance in the Third World.

Village councils in India (panchayats) invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant the needs of the gender of the council leader.

There remains discrimination against African-American names in job applications. “White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews,” even when qualification and experience are accounted for.

Sometime ago, I came across this, a self-writing, right-wing, pro-war blog.

“R. Robot (‘Debasing the Political Discourse @ Superhuman Speed’) is a rhetoric simulator. He shuffles grammatical chunks into into thousands of loathesome new templates. He’s a Perl CGI script, hooked up to a Movable Type engine for good measure — making him the first blogger who is also a computer program (to the best of our knowledge. . . He writes his columns instantly. . . His adjectives and nouns are taken from a Newt Gingrich memo called ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.’ It recommends using words like ‘candid,’ ‘pristine,’ and ‘reform’ for your team’s ideas, and imagery like ‘machine,’ ‘abuse of power,’ and ‘decay’ for the other guy’s. Most of R.’s grammar engrams are lifted from some of the most lovable editorials of the pre-Quagmire era. Those were heady times, when the like of Ann Coulter, Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan and the late Michael Kelly took fearlessly to their PowerBooks. For those too young to remember, these mighty scribes of ’02 saw themselves as the lone voices warning of a shocking Fifth Column: that is, people who disagreed with landing the U.S.A. in its current predicament. If not for these scribes, an uninformed world never would have seen the Warbot — and we all would have been helpless to stop Al Gore, Harry Belafonte, and Saddam Hussein from teaming up to betray the world.”

Test it out. Enter your name or someone else’s in the field below the control panel, and watch the satisfying slander, er, libel.

“Edwin Williamson’s new life of the great writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is thoroughly engrossing, and fans of the Argentine’s ficciones will want to read it without delay. But like socialist literature of the 1930s, this biography wants to fit unruly human life into a theoretical mold. Throughout these pages, Borges is made to appear a divided man, one who desperately, and until his final years unsuccessfully, yearns for spiritual unity. Williamson discovers polarities everywhere. As a child Borges is torn between admiration for his martial ancestors (symbolized by the sword) and an equal admiration for the romantic violence of raffish knife-fighters and petty criminals (the dagger). As a young man, he is caught between the example of his father, the bookish, philandering would-be artist, and the demands of his controlling mother, whom he never disobeys, no matter how stultifying her attentions, how suffocating her devotion. Worst of all, as an adult, Borges repeatedly desires the love of a good woman or even a bad one, but though his spirit may sometimes be willing, his flesh is apparently always weak: Whether traumatized by memories of an unsuccessful adolescent visit to a prostitute or fearful of offending imperious Mama, he can never, his biographer strongly suggests, actually bring himself to go to bed with anybody.”

More from Michael Dirda’s review in the Washington Post.

“I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean,” writes David Gessner, “Today’s nature writing is too often pious, safe, boring. Haven’t these people re-read Thoreau lately?” From the Boston Globe.

“An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug [Prozac] nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater.” Nargis Raza pointed out this report to me from the BBC.

“Risk is high, cost is enormous, science is insignificant. Does anyone have a good rationale for sending humans into space?” James A. Van Allen (discoverer of the eponymous Van Allen belt) asks, then answers, here in Issues in Science and Technology Online.

By way of Norman Geras (author of two excellent books, Marx and Human Nature and The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg), Al Yankovic (of “Eat It” and “O Ricky” fame) has written a song in, er, a tribute-parody to Bob Dylan. It appears on his ablum Poodle Hat. Every line in the song is a palindrome.

Bob by Al Yankovic

Lyrics:

I, man, am regal – a German am I
Never odd or even
If I had a hi-fi
Madam, I’m Adam
Too hot to hoot
No lemons, no melon
Too bad I hid a boot
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Warsaw was raw
Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Rise to vote, sir
Do geese see God?
“Do nine men interpret?” “Nine men,” I nod
Rats live on no evil star
Won’t lovers revolt now?
Race fast, safe car
Pa’s a sap
Ma is as selfless as I am
May a moody baby doom a yam?

Ah, Satan sees Natasha
No devil lived on
Lonely Tylenol
Not a banana baton
No “x” in “Nixon”
O, stone, be not so
O Geronimo, no minor ego
“Naomi,” I moan
“A Toyota’s a Toyota”
A dog, a panic in a pagoda

Oh no! Don Ho!
Nurse, I spy gypsies – run!
Senile felines
Now I see bees I won
UFO tofu
We panic in a pew
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
God! A red nugget! A fat egg under a dog!
Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog

The big story leading into the Olympics is the battle between the Australian swimming god Ian ‘Thorpedo’ Thorpe and the young but highly-rated American Michael Phelps, whose goal as detailed in this profile is to equal Mark Spitz’s take of seven gold medals in 1972. Thorpe is the most famous and adored athlete in Australia, where swimming is widely popular. Famously outspoken, he backed off a bit from his claim that Phelps’ ambition was impossible in the first interviews from Athens today. Incidentally, Ryan McGinley, a downtown New York photographer best known for transposing the Nan Goldin aesthetic to the Vice magazine generation, shot the U.S. swim team for the Times magazine. They are beautiful photographs; the best things I’ve seen by McGinley.

I was first taken by Paul Muldoon when I came upon Madoc in college. Not too long ago, the Newshour did an interview with Muldoon after he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In it there was a brief clip of a multimedia ‘reading’ of Muldoon’s “A Collegelands Catechism”. I looked for it only to find that you had to be a Princeton student to download it . . . but no longer. Enjoy, seriously, look at this virtual “perfomance”..

Fredric Jameson’s piece on William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in the New Left Review has much to recommend it, though not necessarily its prose. It’s still worth a read.

“[C]yberpunk constitutes a kind of laboratory experiment in which the geographic-cultural light spectrum and bandwidths of the new system are registered. Indeed, an inspection of this literature already provides a first crude inventory of the new world system: the immense role—and manifest in [William] Gibson’s evocations, all the way down to Pattern Recognition itself—of Japan as the monitory semiotic combination of First-World science-and-technology with a properly Third-World population explosion. Russia now also looms large, but above all in the form of its various Mafias (from all the former Republics), which remind us of the anarchy and violent crime, as well as of the conspiratorial networks and jobless futures, that lurk just beneath the surface of capitalism. . . Europe’s image ambiguity—a kind of elegant museum or tourist playground which is also an evolutionary and economic dead end—is instructive . . . But it is by way of its style that we can best measure the new literature on some kind of time-continuum; and here we may finally return to the distinctiveness of Pattern Recognition, where this style has reached a kind of classical perfection.”

Fredric Jameson’s Reflections on William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition: a contemporary dialectic of style, as the Verne of cyberspace turns to the branded present and its nauseas

Recently, the evolution/creationism debate has taken a turn. Proponents of intelligent design have launched the best offensive (at least on the political and public relations front, if not necessarily in the scientific arena) seen to date. Periodic debates have become almost daily ones. Nancy Pearcey, one proponent of intelligent design at the Center for Science and Culture, which despite its name, aims to “challeng[e] various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory”, has concisely phrased the hopes of the ID project.

“By uncovering evidence that natural phenomena are best accounted for by Intelligence, Mind, and Purpose, the theory of Intelligent Design reconnects religion to the realm of public knowledge. . . Only when we are willing to restore Christianity to the status of genuine knowledge will we be able to effectively engage the ‘cognitive war’ that is at the root of today’s culture war.”

(See the discussion on The Panda’s Thumb, a virtual pub of the University of Ediacara, where patrons gather to discuss evolutionary theory and critique the claims of the antievolution movement.)

We at 3QD first noticed the turn in the debate a few years ago on the pages of the Boston Review, where H. Allen Orr first reviewed Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, and shortly there afterwards, William Dembski’s, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. (See the exchanges that followed here, here, and here.)

Taking an intermittent look at the debate is often startling. Richard Dawkins (alongside Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries) has recently accused Tony Blair (Labour PM Tony Blair) of effectively supporting the teaching of intelligent design.

Of interest to some on these issues may also be Dawkins comments here and here on science’s and religion’s roles in both explanation and ethics.

“With the knowledge web, humanity’s accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to teach will have a way to reach those who what to learn. Teachers will move beyond their present role as dispensers of information and become guides, mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge web will make us all smarter. The knowledge web is an idea whose time has come.” Article here at edge.org by Danny Hillis (of Thinking Machine Corporation–massively parallel computing–fame). Also, responses by Douglas Rushkoff, Marc D. Hauser, Stewart Brand, Jim O’Donnell, Jaron Lanier, Bruce Sterling, Roger Schank, George Dyson, Howard Gardner, Seymour Papert, Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, Kai Krause, and Pamela McCorduck.

“Mothers who think they have longer to live are more likely to give birth to boys than girls, a survey of British women shows. The finding backs up the long-held theory that women may unwittingly be able to influence the sex of their unborn child. ” Short article here from Nature.

This is a gorgeous site. “Based on the award-winning book by the architect James Sanders, the Celluloid Skyline website is a multimedia exploration of cities, film, and architecture. It is based on the premise that the mythic city of “movie New York,” which has entertained and excited audiences around the world for generations, is also something more: an extraordinary urban resource, with profound lessons about the design and use of cities.” Thanks to Marko Ahtisaari for pointing it out.

“Time magazine spurred public debate 40 years ago with a startling question on its cover: ‘Is God Dead?’ Some estimate that half the world’s population was then nominally atheist. And many in the West were predicting that scientific progress would eliminate religious belief altogether by the next century. The tide has dramatically turned, however, and Alistar McGrath – a theologian at Oxford University who was once in that camp – charts the shift in currents of thought in The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World.” More here from the Christian Science Monitor.

“Why are so many national anthems so bad? Why is it that the music only rarely reflects the culture of the country? How much better it would be if there was a salsa number for Cuba, a tango for Argentina, a Verdi aria for Italy, a Bob Marley song for Jamaica and a James Brown funk tune for America… even the recent anthems of the post-colonial nations are mostly pompous dirges. Ironically, a 19th-century European flavour was seen as having the correct seriousness for a new country.” Full story here in The Telegraph.

* Lines from the National Anthem of the Republic of Congo.

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a prize of $1,000,000 for each of seven unsolved problems in math. Among these are the P vs. NP problem, the Poincare Conjecture, Yang-Mills Theory, and the Riemann Hypothesis.

Now, in a strange twist (pointed out to me by J.M. Tyree), a reputable mathematician named Louis de Branges, who has previously proved the Bieberbach conjecture, claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis, and has posted his proof on the web. But no mathematician will look at the proof to check if it is correct because, de Branges claims, they don’t like him. Here’s the odd story from the London Review of Books.

For those who don’t read Arabic a great source of ‘inside’ information are the many and interesting blogs being written in English from inside Iraq. Several of particular note are, Healing Iraq, Baghdad Burning, and Life in Iraq. Other blogs can be reached through the links at these blogs. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to call it truly important reading material.