“When Matthew Blakeslee shapes hamburger patties with his hands, he experiences a vivid bitter taste in his mouth. Esmerelda Jones (a pseudonym) sees blue when she listens to the note C sharp played on the piano; other notes evoke different hues–so much so that the piano keys are actually color-coded, making it easier for her to remember and play musical scales. And when Jeff Coleman looks at printed black numbers, he sees them in color, each a different hue. Blakeslee, Jones and Coleman are among a handful of otherwise normal people who have synesthesia. They experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious no-man’s-land between fantasy and reality. For them the senses–touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell–get mixed up instead of remaining separate.

Modern scientists have known about synesthesia since 1880, when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, published a paper in Nature on the phenomenon. But most have brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. About four years ago, however, we and others began to uncover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. Along the way, we also found new clues to some of the most mysterious aspects of the human mind, such as the emergence of abstract thought, metaphor and perhaps even language.”

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard write about synesthesia here in Scientific American. (See also my earlier post about V.S. Ramachandran here.)

“First things first, I poppa, freaks all the honeys
Dummies – playboy bunnies, those wantin’ money
Those the ones I like ’cause they don’t get nathan’
But penetration, unless it smells like sanitation
Garbage, I turn like doorknobs
Heart throb, never, black and ugly as ever
However, I stay coochied down to the socks
Rings and watch filled with rocks

As a general rule, I perform deviant sexual acts with women of all kinds, including but not limited to those with limited intellect, nude magazine models, and whores. I particularly enjoy sexual encounters with the latter group as they are generally disappointed in the fact that they only receive penile intercourse and nothing more, unless of course, they douche on a consistent basis. Although I am extremely unattractive, I am able to engage in these types of sexual acts with some regularity. Perhaps my sexuality is somehow related to my fancy and expensive jewelery.”

Not bad, huh? From an Oakland high-school student’s ebonics translation assignment, posted in its amusing entirety here (scroll to the bottom) at the infomative hipster blog www.ephemeroi.com. The Oakland interpreter has a good feel for the Shakespearean figural density and bemused pomposity that made B.I.G. ‘not only a client, but the player president.’

“In India, when the release of a film is accompanied by riots, it’s not so much a spontaneous measure of outrage as it is the hallmark of certain groups’ official disfavor–like Ebert and Roeper’s ‘two thumbs down,’ only rowdier. So when the opening of Karan Razdan’s Girlfriend this June was met with two days of rioting in five Indian cities, with windows smashed, cinemas forcibly closed, and billboards set afire by angry mobs of young men in the street, it was only the Hindu traditionalist vigilantes of the Shiv Sena handing in their verdict. It was not, by any stretch, a full showing of the spectrum of people in India who hate this film.

Girlfriend is Bollywood’s first extended foray into Sapphic eroticism (alas, to call it the industry’s first film ‘about lesbianism’ would be too generous). It is also a movie that has managed to offend India’s fledgling lesbian and gay community every bit as deeply as it offends the Hindu right–making these two factions strange bedfellows.”

More here from The New Republic (free registration required).

Almost all of us are mindreaders to the extent that we can judge other people’s emotions just by looking at them, but this ability is lost or severely attenuated in autistic people. Partly because autism is much more common among men than women (who tend to be better at reading others), psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen believes that the disorder should just be considered an extreme form of maleness. In other words, autism exists on a continuum: some have extreme cases, while others are mildly inattentive to the emotions of others. Find out where you stand by taking this test for the Autism-Spectrum Quotient that he has developed.

“Last month my students and I took a field trip to a small forest reserve a couple of miles from our university campus in Malaysian Borneo. Slip-sliding down a steep jungle path, clutching the soggy stems of wild yams in a futile attempt to stay upright, we collapsed into a pebbly streambed. As we regained our composure and began to look around the steep-sided valley cluttered with the mossy logs of fallen rainforest giants, one of the students, Sharifah Ibrahim, suddenly pointed upward: “A Rajah Brooke!” We all looked, and down came the graceful butterfly, gliding on its long emerald and black wings and settling at a puddle to drink.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Alfred Russel Wallace must have stood in similar awe when he first saw this spectacular birdwing butterfly in Sarawak, a few hundred miles down the coast from where we were hiking. Having arrived in Borneo in November 1854, the naturalist struck up a friendship with the legendary Sir James Brooke, the first “white rajah” of Sarawak. It was Brooke who gave him a specimen of the as-yet-unnamed species. Wallace immediately dispatched a note to the Entomological Society of London, naming the species Ornithoptera brookiana after his new friend…”

Menno Schilthuizen reviews two biographies of the man who came up with natural selection independently of Darwin: The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace by Ross A. Slotten, and An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace by Martin Fichman, here in Natural History Magazine.

“While families gathered at ground zero on Saturday to read out the names of lost loved ones, an artist and a team of riggers uptown at Rockefeller Center were just beginning to place seven climbing life-size human figures on a slanted pole soaring 100 feet in the air.

As a lone American flag flew at half-staff behind him, the artist, Jonathan Borofsky, repeatedly told curious passers-by that his work, ‘Walking to the Sky,’ had nothing to do with 9/11.

Yet its theme – a portrait of humanity rising up from the earth and heading into the unknown in a collective search for wisdom – seemed eerily poignant.”

More here from the New York Times.

Jonathan Corum runs a web site of brilliant visual aids, style.org. Have a look at his beautiful diagrams of birds in flight, county breakdowns of the Democratic Iowa caucuses, his Mars panoramas, or, most recently, his graphical depiction of the nationalities of enemy combatants held at Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay.

Anyone who fully understands what is going on in Russia these days is more sophisticated than I. A site where you can learn just how much you don’t understand about the Russian mind is Pravda.ru. And what to make of this story about the direction of time? Finally, as you read about time’s reversals, at the bar to the left you can find out more about what constitutes a ‘Fun Story’ on the Volga.

It’s nice to know that there is still a Pravda newspaper, even if nowdays the Russian truth-machine reads more like Fortean Times than “workers of the world unite.” David Gassaway forwarded me this madness about putative Russian time-travel experiments:

“In August 2001, a new model of the time machine meant for a human was set in a remote forest in Russia’s Volgograd Region. When the machine even operated on car batteries and had low capacity, it still managed to change the time by three per cent; the change was registered with symmetrical crystal oscillators.”

Read the whole article, “Time Can Be Turned Back,” published in Pravda’s science section, here. The top science story on Pravda’s website is currently “UFO Clouds Abduct Humans.” The header reads: “Probably, the phenomenon of mysterious ‘reasonable’ clouds represents an independent form of life.” Probably not. And it is worth noting that, strictly speaking, Pravda isn’t even Pravda anymore.

One of the most talented young painters in New York is a woman named Shahzia Sikander. Named one of 20 “Artists for the New Millenium” by the New York Times, Shahzia has a new show coming up at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. “I am very excited about it. There is a live performance too (a collaboration between dancer Sharmilla Desai and myself) at 5pm,” says Shahzia in an email.

Look at some of Shahzia’s work here and here.

There’s more about the show here, and more about Shahzia here, and a conversation between Shahzia and Homi K. Bhabha can be found here. Oh, and here is an interview of Shahzia and Nilima Sheikh by Vishakha N. Desai of the Asia Society.

Art Spiegelman told the assembled audience at Cooper Union on September 10 that he couldn’t get a major American media outlet (besides the Forward) to serialize “In the Shadow of No Towers,” the artist’s depiction of September 11, 2001. Instead the panels appeared mostly in Europe. At his lecture and slideshow, the chain-smoking Spiegelman described his famous black-on-black New Yorker cover after the terrorist attacks, as well as his increasing suspicion that the magazine’s “monocle” was a far too reasonable lens for his September 11 work. Michiko Kakutani has reviewed the book here, which is now available from Pantheon. There has been an outpouring of work about the attacks, of course, but, to my knowledge, nothing on this scale from a major artistic or literary figure that attempts to encompass the whole of September 11.

“This week has seen protests around Canada—and at Canadian Embassies worldwide—as citizens grapple with an issue that blurs the boundary between religious tolerance and oppression. The Ontario government is considering a proposal to allow certain family law matters—including divorce, custody, and inheritance—to be arbitrated by panels of Muslim clerics. Supporters of the proposal say that Canada’s commitment to cultural diversity requires that Muslim law be accorded the same respect as other legal systems. Opponents say Muslim law inherently conflicts with the basic freedoms guaranteed Canadians.” More here from Slate. (Thanks to A. Kynikos for sending this along.)

Musings has a post on perhaps the geekiest and most clever help-wanted ad ever. It’s brief and worth a look. To tease, it begins with:

www.{first 10-digit prime found in the consecutive digits of e}.com

Brad de Long points to an interesting paper by Nathan Nunn of the University of Toronto on African economic development and the slave trade. The paper, “Slavery, Institutional Development, and Long-Run Growth in Africa, 1400-2000”, seems pretty impressive. I’ve only glanced through it, but the reconstruction of the data for the exports of slaves over a 600 hundred year period is quite an accomplishment. The claim in a nutshell:

Can Africa’s current state of under-development be partially attributed to the large trade in slaves that occurred during the Atlantic, Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades? Evidence from the historical literature suggests that the answer to this may be yes. This study attempts to answer this question empirically. Combining shipping data with historical records reporting slave ethnicities, I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa between 1400 and 1913. Using this measure, I find the number of slaves exported from a country to be an important determinant of economic performance in the second half of the 20th century. To address the potential problems of measurement error and unobservable country characteristics, I instrument slave exports using measures of the distance from each country to the major slave markets around the world. I also find evidence that the channel through which the slave trade affects development today is through the slave trade’s past impact on the formation of domestic institutions.

Nunn controls for ethnic fractionalization, Islam, Christianity, and primary resource extraction. He also shows that the effects of the slave trade are channeled through their institutional effects: political stability, the quality and accountability of the government, property rights. This of course makes sense in so much as we can expect huge and regular demographic upheavals to disrupt the ability of societies to solve collective problems in ways that benefit all and to open themselves up to predation by opportunists and marauders, inside and outside the state. For those interested, here’s another paper by Nunn outlining this mechanism (in game-theor-ese).

Despite the existence of empirical studies linking Africa’s current underdevelopment to its history of exploitation, a formal theoretical explanation of this link has yet to be made. How could these past events have had apparently lasting impacts? I provide a game-theoretic model that explains how extraction during the slave trade and colonial rule resulted in a permanent increase in rent-seeking behavior and a permanent decrease in the security of private property, both of which have helped foster Africa’s current underdevelopment.

The finds aren’t startling, but we do live in a world in which many have a tendency to downplay the hugely negative consequences of slavery for today and not merely for the past. As with all interesting work, more questions, I expect, will flow from these answers.

“A young man from a small provincial town — a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections and without a university education — moved to London in the late 1580’s and, in a remarkably short time, became the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. His works appeal to the learned and the unlettered, to urban sophisticates and provincial first-time theatergoers. He makes his audiences laugh and cry; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. He grasps with equal penetration the intimate lives of kings and of beggars; he seems at one moment to have studied law, at another theology, at another ancient history, while at the same time he effortlessly mimics the accents of country bumpkins and takes delight in old wives’ tales. Virtually all his rivals in the highly competitive theater business found themselves on the straight road to starvation; this one playwright by contrast made enough money to buy one of the best houses in the hometown to which he retired when he was around 50, the self-made protagonist of an amazing success story that has resisted explanation for 400 years.”

More here by Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Times Magazine.

“Midwesterners tend to be viewed as measured people. As a longtime resident of Garland, Neb., do you think there is any truth to the popular image?

I’ve often thought that in any village you could find the seeds of every variety of personality, from the ax murderer to the opera diva.”

From a short interview of Ted Kooser, the new US Poet Laureate by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine.

“What people think about many of the big issues that will be discussed in the next two months – like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the role of religion in public life – is intimately related to their views on human nature. And while there may be differences between Republicans and Democrats, one fundamental assumption is accepted by almost everyone. This would be reassuring – if science didn’t tell us that this assumption is mistaken.

People see bodies and souls as separate; we are common-sense dualists. The President’s Council on Bioethics expressed this belief system with considerable eloquence in its December 2003 report ‘Being Human’: ‘We have both corporeal and noncorporeal aspects. We are embodied spirits and inspirited bodies (or, if you will, embodied minds and minded bodies).'”

More here in an editorial by Paul Bloom in the New York Times.

“The Muslim world is changing. Three years after the atrocity of 9/11, it may be in the early stages of a reformation, albeit with a small ‘r’. From Morocco to Indonesia, people are trying to develop a more contemporary and humane interpretation of Islam, and some countries are undergoing major transformations.” More here by Ziauddin Sardar in The New Statesman (via Arts & Letters Daily).

On a related note, in India last year, the well-known poet, and Bollywood scriptwriter and lyricist, Javed Akhtar, started a group known as Muslims for Secular Democracy, which hopes to give voice to the silent majority of muslims who are not fundamentalists. Predictably, he has been threatened and told to stay in line by conservatives. More here.

F.W. Murnau (1888-1931), the German Expressionist filmmaker perhaps best known for his films “The Last Laugh” (1924), “Sunrise” (1927), and the beautifully shot “Nosferatu” (1922), is enjoying a retrospective at Film Forum from September 10th through the 20th. David Denby’s short review of Murnau can be found here.

“A group of European-led astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system.” More here from CNN.